head to head · open source
portainer vs meshery
portainer has 38,524 GitHub stars, 2,906 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. meshery has 11,820 stars, 3,864 forks, 1,983 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portainer leads on adoption by 226% (38,524 vs 11,820 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; meshery is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, meshery 33%. meshery was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | meshery | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 12K |
| License | Zlib | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 3.9K |
| 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 meshery if
- You want the meshery feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and meshery 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 meshery
Meshery is an open source, cloud native manager — a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project released under the Apache 2.0 licence — that provides a self service engineering platform for designing and managing Kubernetes based infrastructure and applications across multiple clusters and multiple clouds, built for platform engineers, operators, and teams who manage Kubernetes at scale.
read the full meshery overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or meshery more popular?
portainer has 38,524 GitHub stars and meshery has 11,820. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and meshery free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and meshery under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and meshery?
portainer is written in TypeScript and meshery in TypeScript. 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 meshery?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,524 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose meshery if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.