head to head · open source
portainer vs sops
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars, 2,934 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops has 23,586 stars, 1,113 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portainer leads on adoption by 64% (38,767 vs 23,586 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, sops 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 | sops | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 24K |
| License | Zlib | MPL-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 sops if
- You want the sops feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sops 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 sops
SOPS: Secrets OPerationS ======================== SOPS is an editor of encrypted files that supports YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats and encrypts with AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, HuaweiCloud KMS, age, and PGP. ( demo ) .. image:: .. image:: :target: Documentation You can find the SOPS documentation on getsops.io under "Docs" . Security Please report any security issues privately using GitHub's advisory form . License Mozilla Public License Version 2.0 Authors SOPS was initially launched as a project at Mozilla in 2015 and has been graciously donated to the CNCF as a Sandbox project in 2023, now…
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or sops more popular?
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars and sops has 23,586. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and sops free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and sops under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and sops?
portainer is written in TypeScript and sops 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 sops?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,767 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose sops if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.