head to head · open source
Pulumi vs goss
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars, 1,431 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. goss has 5,971 stars, 501 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Pulumi leads on adoption by 330% (25,694 vs 5,971 stars). Pulumi is written in Go under Apache-2.0; goss is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Pulumi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, goss 8%. Pulumi was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (go, 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 | goss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 501 |
| 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 goss if
- You want the goss 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 goss 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 goss
Goss is an Apache 2.0 licensed, Go based YAML test runner that validates the configuration of a server or container and can expose the result as a health endpoint, built for DevOps engineers and SREs who need fast, repeatable checks on Linux hosts, Docker containers, and Kubernetes workloads.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or goss more popular?
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars and goss has 5,971. Pulumi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pulumi and goss free?
Both are open source. Pulumi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and goss under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pulumi and goss?
Pulumi is written in Go and goss 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 goss?
Choose Pulumi if you want the larger community (25,694 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose goss if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.