head to head · open source
rancher vs Dagu
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars, 3,225 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Dagu has 4,536 stars, 392 forks, 67 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rancher leads on adoption by 474% (26,031 vs 4,536 stars). rancher is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Dagu is written in Go under GPL-3.0. rancher has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, Dagu 9%. rancher was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| rancher | Dagu | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 392 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick rancher 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 Dagu if
- You want the Dagu feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Dagu fits your workflow better
About rancher
Rancher Rancher is an open source container management platform built for organizations that deploy containers in production. Rancher makes it easy to run Kubernetes everywhere, meet IT requirements, and empower DevOps teams. Stable Release v2.15.1 rancher/rancher:v2.15.1 / rancher/rancher:stable Read the full release notes. To get automated notifications of our latest release, you can watch the announcements category in our forums, or subscribe to the RSS feed Quick Start sudo docker run d restart=unless stopped p 80:80 p 443:443 privileged rancher/rancher Open your browser to Installation See…
read the full rancher overview →
About Dagu
Docs · CLI · API · Examples · Live demo (username/password: demouser) · Discord Dagu Dagu is a local first workflow engine for operations and internal automation. It is open source and self hostable: a single binary with a built in Web UI, no external database or message broker, running on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Define DAGs in a declarative YAML format. It natively supports shell commands, Docker containers, Kubernetes Jobs, remote commands via SSH, and more through Dagu Actions. Dagu turns existing scripts and runbooks into production workflows with scheduling, retries, human tasks, and run history. It runs…
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Frequently asked questions
Is rancher or Dagu more popular?
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars and Dagu has 4,536. rancher has the larger community by that measure.
Are rancher and Dagu free?
Both are open source. rancher is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Dagu under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rancher and Dagu?
rancher is written in Go and Dagu 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, rancher or Dagu?
Choose rancher if you want the larger community (26,031 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Dagu if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.