head to head · open source
rancher vs moon
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars, 3,225 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. moon has 4,175 stars, 260 forks, 99 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rancher leads on adoption by 523% (26,031 vs 4,175 stars). rancher is written in Go under Apache-2.0; moon is written in Rust under MIT. rancher has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, moon 6%. 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 | moon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 4.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 260 |
| 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 moon if
- You want the moon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and moon 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 moon
moon moon is a repository m anagement, o rganization, o rchestration, and n otification tool for the web ecosystem, written in Rust. Many of the concepts within moon are heavily inspired from Bazel and other popular build systems. Documentation Contributing Code of conduct Why use moon? Working in a developer ecosystem can be very involved, especially when it comes to managing a repository effectively. Which package manager to use? Which language version to use? How to import packages? How to build code? So on and so forth. moon aims to streamline this entire process and provide a first class developer…
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Frequently asked questions
Is rancher or moon more popular?
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars and moon has 4,175. rancher has the larger community by that measure.
Are rancher and moon free?
Both are open source. rancher is licensed under Apache-2.0 and moon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rancher and moon?
rancher is written in Go and moon in Rust. 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 moon?
Choose rancher if you want the larger community (26,031 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose moon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.