head to head · open source
rancher vs moon
rancher has 25,922 GitHub stars, 3,222 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. moon has 4,105 stars, 252 forks, 99 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rancher leads on adoption by 531% (25,922 vs 4,105 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 | ★ 4.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 252 |
| 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 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 moon
moon is a repository management, organization, orchestration, and notification tool for the web ecosystem, written in Rust under the MIT license. It is a build system and monorepo management tool whose concepts are heavily inspired by Bazel and other build systems. The project is associated with build system, monorepo tooling, ci cd, Node.js, JavaScript, Bun, Deno, Go, Python, and Ruby topics.
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Frequently asked questions
Is rancher or moon more popular?
rancher has 25,922 GitHub stars and moon has 4,105. 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 (25,922 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose moon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.