head to head · open source
portainer vs terragrunt
portainer has 38,524 GitHub stars, 2,906 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. terragrunt has 9,840 stars, 1,226 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portainer leads on adoption by 292% (38,524 vs 9,840 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; terragrunt is written in Go under MIT. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, terragrunt 12%. terragrunt 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 | terragrunt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 9.8K |
| License | Zlib | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 terragrunt if
- You want the terragrunt feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and terragrunt 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 terragrunt
Terragrunt is an MIT licensed, Go based orchestration tool that lets Infrastructure as Code written in OpenTofu or Terraform scale, and it is built for DevOps and cloud infrastructure teams that already run that tooling.
read the full terragrunt overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or terragrunt more popular?
portainer has 38,524 GitHub stars and terragrunt has 9,840. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and terragrunt free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and terragrunt under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and terragrunt?
portainer is written in TypeScript and terragrunt 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 terragrunt?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,524 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose terragrunt if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.