head to head · open source
Pulumi vs freelens
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars, 1,431 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. freelens has 5,588 stars, 331 forks, 223 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Pulumi leads on adoption by 360% (25,694 vs 5,588 stars). Pulumi is written in Go under Apache-2.0; freelens is written in TypeScript under MIT. Pulumi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, freelens 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 | freelens | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 5.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 331 |
| 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 freelens if
- You want the freelens feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and freelens 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 freelens
Freelens is a free and open source user interface for managing Kubernetes clusters. It is distributed as a standalone desktop application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and it exists inside the cloud native ecosystem alongside the containers, DevOps, and Kubernetes tooling that its topic list names. The project is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license, and it reached its current shape over roughly two years of development. The public repository carries more than five thousand stars and over three hundred forks, with an active issue tracker and community channels on Discord and Reddit.…
read the full freelens overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or freelens more popular?
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars and freelens has 5,588. Pulumi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pulumi and freelens free?
Both are open source. Pulumi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and freelens under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pulumi and freelens?
Pulumi is written in Go and freelens in TypeScript. 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 freelens?
Choose Pulumi if you want the larger community (25,694 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose freelens if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.