head to head · open source
rancher vs dtm
rancher has 25,924 GitHub stars, 3,221 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dtm has 10,919 stars, 997 forks, 87 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. rancher leads on adoption by 137% (25,924 vs 10,919 stars). rancher is written in Go under Apache-2.0; dtm is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. rancher has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, dtm 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 | dtm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-01-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 997 |
| 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 dtm if
- You want the dtm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and dtm fits your workflow better
About rancher
Rancher is an Apache 2.0 licensed, Go based open source container management platform for organizations that deploy containers in production and need to run Kubernetes everywhere while meeting IT requirements and empowering DevOps teams.
read the full rancher overview →
About dtm
DTM is a distributed transaction framework that provides cross service eventual data consistency for microservices, with saga, TCC, XA, 2 phase message, outbox, and workflow patterns plus SDKs for Go, Java, PHP, C , Python, and Node.js.
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Frequently asked questions
Is rancher or dtm more popular?
rancher has 25,924 GitHub stars and dtm has 10,919. rancher has the larger community by that measure.
Are rancher and dtm free?
Both are open source. rancher is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dtm under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rancher and dtm?
rancher is written in Go and dtm 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 dtm?
Choose rancher if you want the larger community (25,924 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dtm if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.