head to head · open source
portainer vs fission
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars, 2,934 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. fission has 8,939 stars, 795 forks, 50 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. portainer leads on adoption by 334% (38,767 vs 8,939 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; fission is written in Go under Apache-2.0. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, fission 9%. portainer was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (docker, hacktoberfest, kubernetes), 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 | fission | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 8.9K |
| License | Zlib | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 795 |
| 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 fission if
- You want the fission 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 fission 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 fission
Fission: Serverless Functions for Kubernetes Fission is an open source, Kubernetes native serverless framework that simplifies the deployment of functions and applications on Kubernetes. With Fission, developers can easily create and deploy serverless functions that can be triggered by a variety of events, such as HTTP requests, messages from a message queue, or scheduled tasks. Fission provides a simple, easy to use interface for developers to create serverless functions in their language of choice, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. The framework also offers automatic scaling, so…
read the full fission overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or fission more popular?
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars and fission has 8,939. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and fission free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and fission under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and fission?
portainer is written in TypeScript and fission 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 fission?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,767 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose fission if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.