head to head · open source
portainer vs infracost
portainer has 38,523 GitHub stars, 2,907 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. infracost has 12,521 stars, 688 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. portainer leads on adoption by 208% (38,523 vs 12,521 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; infracost is written in Go under Apache-2.0. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, infracost 5%. portainer was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | infracost | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 13K |
| License | Zlib | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 688 |
| 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 infracost if
- You want the infracost 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 infracost 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 infracost
Infracost is an open source cloud cost intelligence tool, written in Go and licensed Apache 2.0, that estimates cloud spend and enforces FinOps policies for Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation and AWS CDK before changes are deployed — built for engineers, platform and DevOps teams, FinOps practitioners, and AI coding agents.
read the full infracost overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or infracost more popular?
portainer has 38,523 GitHub stars and infracost has 12,521. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and infracost free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and infracost under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and infracost?
portainer is written in TypeScript and infracost 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 infracost?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,523 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose infracost if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.