head to head · open source
rancher vs vps-audit
rancher has 25,924 GitHub stars, 3,221 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vps-audit has 3,128 stars, 305 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. rancher leads on adoption by 729% (25,924 vs 3,128 stars). rancher is written in Go under Apache-2.0; vps-audit is written in Shell under MIT. rancher has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, vps-audit 10%. 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 | vps-audit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Shell |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-08-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 305 |
| 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 vps-audit if
- You want the vps-audit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You evaluated both and vps-audit 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 vps-audit
vps audit is a lightweight, dependency free bash script for security, performance auditing and infrastructure monitoring of Linux servers. It lives in the Linux server administration and DevOps ecosystem, and its topics include bash, debian, devops, ec2, infrastructure, linux, monitoring, performance monitoring, security, and ci cd. The project is distributed as a Shell script under the MIT license, and the repository is described as a Nuver Labs project.
read the full vps-audit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rancher or vps-audit more popular?
rancher has 25,924 GitHub stars and vps-audit has 3,128. rancher has the larger community by that measure.
Are rancher and vps-audit free?
Both are open source. rancher is licensed under Apache-2.0 and vps-audit under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rancher and vps-audit?
rancher is written in Go and vps-audit in Shell. 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 vps-audit?
Choose rancher if you want the larger community (25,924 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose vps-audit if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.