head to head · open source
Pulumi vs crossplane
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars, 1,431 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crossplane has 12,083 stars, 1,264 forks, 194 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Pulumi leads on adoption by 113% (25,694 vs 12,083 stars). Pulumi is written in Go under Apache-2.0; crossplane is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Pulumi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, crossplane 10%. Pulumi was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cloud-computing, containers), 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 | crossplane | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 crossplane if
- You want the crossplane 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 crossplane 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 crossplane
Crossplane is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation framework for building cloud native control planes without writing code, aimed at platform and infrastructure teams that run Kubernetes and need to orchestrate applications and infrastructure across clouds through declarative APIs.
read the full crossplane overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or crossplane more popular?
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars and crossplane has 12,083. Pulumi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pulumi and crossplane free?
Both are open source. Pulumi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crossplane under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pulumi and crossplane?
Pulumi is written in Go and crossplane 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 crossplane?
Choose Pulumi if you want the larger community (25,694 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crossplane if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.