head to head · open source
Pulumi vs dagger
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars, 1,431 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagger has 16,261 stars, 924 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Pulumi leads on adoption by 58% (25,694 vs 16,261 stars). Pulumi is written in Go under Apache-2.0; dagger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Pulumi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, dagger 6%. Pulumi was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | dagger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 16K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 924 |
| 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 dagger if
- You want the dagger 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 dagger 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 dagger
Dagger is an open source automation engine for software delivery, written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It builds, tests and ships any codebase, and it runs locally, inside a CI server, or directly in the cloud. The project lives in the cloud infrastructure and CI/CD ecosystem, where it occupies the space normally filled by shell scripts and proprietary pipeline YAML. It has been developed for roughly seven years and carries a substantial community footprint, with more than sixteen thousand stars and over nine hundred forks on GitHub.
read the full dagger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or dagger more popular?
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars and dagger has 16,261. Pulumi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pulumi and dagger free?
Both are open source. Pulumi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dagger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pulumi and dagger?
Pulumi is written in Go and dagger 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 dagger?
Choose Pulumi if you want the larger community (25,694 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dagger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.