head to head · open source
rancher vs ergo
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars, 3,225 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ergo has 4,693 stars, 193 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. rancher leads on adoption by 455% (26,031 vs 4,693 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 | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 193 |
| 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 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 ergo
Actor model for Go. Build distributed systems without the distributed systems headache. Goroutines and channels work great until your system grows. Then come the mutexes, the race conditions, the service discovery configs, the retry logic, the connection pool management. Ergo replaces all of that with one model: isolated processes that communicate through messages, supervised automatically, addressable across any cluster. Inspired by Erlang/OTP. Zero external dependencies. Pure Go. The core idea in 30 seconds No locks. No race conditions. Sequential message handling is the guarantee. Why not just goroutines +…
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Frequently asked questions
Is rancher or ergo more popular?
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,693. 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 (26,031 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.