head to head · open source
portainer vs dagger
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars, 2,934 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagger has 16,573 stars, 946 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portainer leads on adoption by 134% (38,767 vs 16,573 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; dagger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, dagger 6%. dagger was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (docker), 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 | dagger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 17K |
| License | Zlib | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 946 |
| 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 dagger if
- You want the dagger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and dagger 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 dagger
Dagger: a better way to ship Dagger is a platform for automating software delivery. It can build, test and ship any codebase, reliably and at scale. Dagger runs locally, in your CI server, or directly in the cloud. Why Dagger? Dagger makes your software delivery programmable , local first , repeatable and observable . Programmable . Shell scripts and proprietary YAML are no longer acceptable for automating software delivery. Dagger provides: a complete execution engine and system API; SDKs for 8 languages; an interactive REPL; a rich ecosystem of reusable modules; and more. Local first . Once you automate a task…
read the full dagger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or dagger more popular?
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars and dagger has 16,573. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and dagger free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and dagger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and dagger?
portainer is written in TypeScript and dagger 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 dagger?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,767 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose dagger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.