head to head · open source
rancher vs ergo
rancher has 25,922 GitHub stars, 3,222 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ergo has 4,660 stars, 191 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. rancher leads on adoption by 456% (25,922 vs 4,660 stars). rancher is written in Go under Apache-2.0; ergo is written in Go under MIT. rancher has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, ergo 4%. 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 | ergo | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 191 |
| 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 ergo if
- You want the ergo feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ergo 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 ergo
Ergo is an actor based framework for Go that brings network transparency to event driven architecture, drawing direct inspiration from Erlang/OTP. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is distributed as a pure Go library with zero external dependencies. The framework models every unit of work as an isolated process that communicates only through messages, so shared state, mutexes, and race conditions are eliminated by design rather than managed by convention.
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Frequently asked questions
Is rancher or ergo more popular?
rancher has 25,922 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,660. rancher has the larger community by that measure.
Are rancher and ergo free?
Both are open source. rancher is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ergo under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rancher and ergo?
rancher is written in Go and ergo 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 ergo?
Choose rancher if you want the larger community (25,922 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.