head to head · open source
portainer vs dagger
portainer has 38,523 GitHub stars, 2,907 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagger has 16,261 stars, 924 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portainer leads on adoption by 137% (38,523 vs 16,261 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 | ★ 16K |
| License | Zlib | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 924 |
| 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, distributed under the zlib licence and aimed at homelab operators, hobbyists, students, and anyone experimenting with containers on their own hardware.
read the full portainer overview →
About dagger
Dagger is an open source automation engine for software delivery, written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It builds, tests and ships any codebase, and it runs locally, inside a CI server, or directly in the cloud. The project lives in the cloud infrastructure and CI/CD ecosystem, where it occupies the space normally filled by shell scripts and proprietary pipeline YAML. It has been developed for roughly seven years and carries a substantial community footprint, with more than sixteen thousand stars and over nine hundred forks on GitHub.
read the full dagger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or dagger more popular?
portainer has 38,523 GitHub stars and dagger has 16,261. 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 (38,523 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose dagger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.