head to head · open source
portainer vs goss
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars, 2,934 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. goss has 6,000 stars, 502 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. portainer leads on adoption by 546% (38,767 vs 6,000 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; goss is written in Go under Apache-2.0. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, goss 8%. portainer 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 | goss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | Zlib | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 502 |
| 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 goss if
- You want the goss 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 goss 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 goss
Goss Quick and Easy server validation Goss in 45 seconds Note: For testing containers see the dgoss wrapper. Also, user submitted wrapper scripts for Kubernetes kgoss and Docker Compose dcgoss. Note: For some Docker/Kubernetes healthcheck, health endpoint, and container ordering examples, see [my blog post][kubernetes simplified health checks]. Introduction What is Goss? Goss is a YAML based serverspec alternative tool for validating a server's configuration. It eases the process of writing tests by allowing the user to generate tests from the current system state. Once the test suite is written they can be…
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or goss more popular?
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars and goss has 6,000. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and goss free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and goss under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and goss?
portainer is written in TypeScript and goss 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 goss?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,767 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose goss if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.