head to head · open source
portainer vs trivy
portainer has 38,523 GitHub stars, 2,907 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. trivy has 37,969 stars, 692 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. portainer leads on adoption by 1% (38,523 vs 37,969 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; trivy is written in Go under Apache-2.0. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, trivy 2%. portainer was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (docker, 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 | trivy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 38K |
| License | Zlib | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 692 |
| 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 trivy if
- You want the trivy 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 trivy 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 trivy
Trivy is an open source security scanner written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It is an Aqua Security open source project, hosted at trivy.dev, and it lives in the cloud native and DevSecOps ecosystem alongside container runtimes, Kubernetes clusters, and infrastructure as code tooling. The design separates two ideas: scanners, which describe the classes of security issue Trivy looks for, and targets, which describe where it looks. The README presents the project as a comprehensive and versatile scanner, and the topic list — containers, devsecops, docker, iac, infrastructure as code, kubernetes…
read the full trivy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or trivy more popular?
portainer has 38,523 GitHub stars and trivy has 37,969. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and trivy free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and trivy under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and trivy?
portainer is written in TypeScript and trivy 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 trivy?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,523 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose trivy if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.