head to head · open source
portainer vs tutorials
portainer has 38,524 GitHub stars, 2,906 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tutorials has 4,691 stars, 3,110 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. portainer leads on adoption by 721% (38,524 vs 4,691 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; tutorials is written in HCL under MIT. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, tutorials 66%. portainer was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | tutorials | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | Zlib | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | HCL |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-05-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 tutorials if
- You want the tutorials feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HCL
- You evaluated both and tutorials 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 tutorials
tutorials is an MIT licensed collection of DevOps lesson material and supporting infrastructure code, organised around the author's YouTube courses and aimed at engineers who want runnable examples for Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Ansible, Packer and serverless work.
read the full tutorials overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or tutorials more popular?
portainer has 38,524 GitHub stars and tutorials has 4,691. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and tutorials free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and tutorials under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and tutorials?
portainer is written in TypeScript and tutorials in HCL. 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 tutorials?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,524 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose tutorials if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.