head to head · open source
Pulumi vs Nitric
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars, 1,431 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Nitric has 2,017 stars, 121 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. Pulumi leads on adoption by 1,174% (25,694 vs 2,017 stars). Pulumi is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Nitric is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Pulumi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, Nitric 6%. Pulumi was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 6 topic tags (aws, azure, cloud, gcp), 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 | Nitric | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-02-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 121 |
| 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 Nitric if
- You want the Nitric 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 Nitric 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 Nitric
Nitric is Apache 2.0 multi language framework for cloud applications. Infrastructure from code. Lives in cloud native infrastructure as code ecosystem. Targets backend services needing APIs, databases, queues, topics, key value stores, buckets.
read the full Nitric overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or Nitric more popular?
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars and Nitric has 2,017. Pulumi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pulumi and Nitric free?
Both are open source. Pulumi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Nitric under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pulumi and Nitric?
Pulumi is written in Go and Nitric 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 Nitric?
Choose Pulumi if you want the larger community (25,694 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Nitric if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.