head to head · open source
portainer vs cds
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars, 2,934 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cds has 4,847 stars, 457 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portainer leads on adoption by 700% (38,767 vs 4,847 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; cds is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cds 9%. portainer was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| portainer | cds | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | Zlib | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 457 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick portainer if
- You weight community size — 39K stars and counting
- You want the Zlib license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cds if
- You want the cds feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cds fits your workflow better
About portainer
Portainer Community Edition is a free, lightweight container management UI for Docker, Swarm, Podman, Kubernetes, and ACI environments. It is provided as is, at no cost, for the convenience of homelab operators, hobbyists, students, and anyone experimenting with containers on their own hardware. Portainer Business Edition builds on the same open source base and adds the features, hardening, and commercial support that production and enterprise environments require (RBAC, GitOps, edge management, audit, SSO, and more). Find out more about Portainer Business Edition features Take3 – get 3 free nodes of Portainer…
read the full portainer overview →
About cds
CDS: Continuous Delivery Service CDS is an Enterprise Grade Continuous Delivery & DevOps Automation Platform written in Go(lang). This project is under active development Documentation Intuitive UI CDS provides an intuitive UI that allows you to build complex workflows, run them and dig into the logs when needed. Create and run workflow with CDS ui. The most powerful Command Line for a CI/CD Platform cdsctl is the CDS Command Line you can script everything with it, cdsctl also provides some cool commands such as cdsctl shell to browse your projects and workflows without the need to open a browser. See all cdsctl…
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or cds more popular?
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars and cds has 4,847. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and cds free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and cds under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and cds?
portainer is written in TypeScript and cds in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, portainer or cds?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,767 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose cds if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.