head to head · open source
Pulumi vs cds
Pulumi has 25,695 GitHub stars, 1,431 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped today. cds has 4,843 stars, 453 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Pulumi leads on adoption by 431% (25,695 vs 4,843 stars). Pulumi is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cds is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. Pulumi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, cds 9%. Pulumi was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (golang), 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
| Pulumi | cds | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 453 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Pulumi if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cds if
- You want the cds feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cds fits your workflow better
About Pulumi
Pulumi is an open source infrastructure as code tool that lets teams define and deploy cloud infrastructure using general purpose programming languages instead of YAML, aimed at developers, platform engineers, and agents working across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Kubernetes.
read the full Pulumi overview →
About cds
CDS is an open source, enterprise grade continuous delivery and DevOps automation platform written in Go, for teams that build, run and own their own CI/CD workflows and want to script and scale them without depending on a hosted vendor.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or cds more popular?
Pulumi has 25,695 GitHub stars and cds has 4,843. Pulumi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pulumi and cds free?
Both are open source. Pulumi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cds under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pulumi and cds?
Pulumi is written in Go and cds 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, Pulumi or cds?
Choose Pulumi if you want the larger community (25,695 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cds if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.