head to head · open source
portainer vs terratest
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars, 2,934 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. terratest has 7,989 stars, 1,366 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. portainer leads on adoption by 385% (38,767 vs 7,989 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; terratest is written in Go under Apache-2.0. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, terratest 17%. portainer was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (docker), 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 | terratest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 8.0K |
| License | Zlib | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 terratest if
- You want the terratest 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 terratest 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 terratest
Terratest Terratest is a Go library that makes it easier to write automated tests for your infrastructure code. It provides a variety of helper functions and patterns for common infrastructure testing tasks, including: Testing Terraform code Testing Packer templates Testing Docker images Executing commands on servers over SSH Working with AWS APIs Working with Azure APIs Working with GCP APIs Working with Kubernetes APIs Testing Helm Charts Making HTTP requests Running shell commands And much more Install Requires Go 1.26 or later. To lock to a specific release instead of @latest , see Pinning a Terratest…
read the full terratest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or terratest more popular?
portainer has 38,767 GitHub stars and terratest has 7,989. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and terratest free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and terratest under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and terratest?
portainer is written in TypeScript and terratest 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 terratest?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,767 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose terratest if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.