head to head · open source
Pulumi vs sops
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars, 1,431 forks, 2,419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops has 23,147 stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Pulumi leads on adoption by 11% (25,694 vs 23,147 stars). Pulumi is written in Go under Apache-2.0; sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0. Pulumi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, sops 5%. Pulumi was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (aws, azure, 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 | sops | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 23K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 sops if
- You want the sops feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sops 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 sops
SOPS, short for Secrets OPerationS, is an editor of encrypted files written in Go and released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. It handles YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats, and it encrypts those files using AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, HuaweiCloud KMS, age, or PGP. The project lives in the cloud native infrastructure ecosystem: it started at Mozilla in 2015, was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2023, and is now a CNCF Sandbox project under a new group of maintainers. It carries 23,121 stars and 1,080 forks, with documentation hosted at getsops.io.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Pulumi or sops more popular?
Pulumi has 25,694 GitHub stars and sops has 23,147. Pulumi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pulumi and sops free?
Both are open source. Pulumi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sops under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pulumi and sops?
Pulumi is written in Go and sops 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 sops?
Choose Pulumi if you want the larger community (25,694 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sops if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.