head to head · open source
Pulumi vs cds
Pulumi has 25,840 GitHub stars, 1,478 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cds has 4,847 stars, 457 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Pulumi leads on adoption by 433% (25,840 vs 4,847 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 | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 457 |
| 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
Infrastructure as Code for Humans and Agents Pulumi Infrastructure as Code is the easiest way to build and deploy infrastructure, of any architecture and on any cloud, using programming languages that you already know and love. Code and ship infrastructure faster with your favorite languages and tools, and embed IaC anywhere with Automation API. Simply write code in your favorite language and Pulumi automatically provisions and manages your resources on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, and 300+ providers using an infrastructure as code approach. Skip the YAML, and use standard language features…
read the full Pulumi overview →
About cds
CDS: Continuous Delivery Service CDS is an Enterprise Grade Continuous Delivery & DevOps Automation Platform written in Go(lang). This project is under active development Documentation Intuitive UI CDS provides an intuitive UI that allows you to build complex workflows, run them and dig into the logs when needed. Create and run workflow with CDS ui. The most powerful Command Line for a CI/CD Platform cdsctl is the CDS Command Line you can script everything with it, cdsctl also provides some cool commands such as cdsctl shell to browse your projects and workflows without the need to open a browser. See all cdsctl…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or cds more popular?
Pulumi has 25,840 GitHub stars and cds has 4,847. 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 (25,840 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.