head to head · open source
portainer vs k8sgpt
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars, 2,934 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. k8sgpt has 8,289 stars, 1,090 forks, 89 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portainer leads on adoption by 368% (38,767 vs 8,289 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; k8sgpt is written in Go under Apache-2.0. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, k8sgpt 13%. k8sgpt was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | k8sgpt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 8.3K |
| License | Zlib | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 k8sgpt if
- You want the k8sgpt 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 k8sgpt 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 k8sgpt
k8sgpt is a tool for scanning your Kubernetes clusters, diagnosing, and triaging issues in simple English. It has SRE experience codified into its analyzers and helps to pull out the most relevant information to enrich it with AI. Out of the box integration with OpenAI, Azure, Cohere, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini and local models. Sister project: Check out sympozium for managing agents in Kubernetes. Table of Contents Overview Installation Quick Start Analyzers Examples LLM AI Backends Key Features Model Context Protocol (MCP) Documentation Contributing Community CLI Installation Linux/Mac via brew or RPM based…
read the full k8sgpt overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or k8sgpt more popular?
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars and k8sgpt has 8,289. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and k8sgpt free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and k8sgpt under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and k8sgpt?
portainer is written in TypeScript and k8sgpt 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 k8sgpt?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,767 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose k8sgpt if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.