head to head · open source
portainer vs sops
portainer has 38,523 GitHub stars, 2,907 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops has 23,148 stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portainer leads on adoption by 66% (38,523 vs 23,148 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%. sops 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 | ★ 23K |
| License | Zlib | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| 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, 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 sops
SOPS, short for Secrets OPerationS, is an editor of encrypted files written in Go and released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. It handles YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats, and it encrypts those files using AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, HuaweiCloud KMS, age, or PGP. The project lives in the cloud native infrastructure ecosystem: it started at Mozilla in 2015, was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2023, and is now a CNCF Sandbox project under a new group of maintainers. It carries 23,121 stars and 1,080 forks, with documentation hosted at getsops.io.
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or sops more popular?
portainer has 38,523 GitHub stars and sops has 23,148. 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 (38,523 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose sops if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.