head to head · open source
rancher vs relay
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars, 3,225 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. relay has 1,089 stars, 95 forks, 286 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rancher leads on adoption by 2,290% (26,031 vs 1,089 stars). rancher is written in Go under Apache-2.0; relay is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. rancher has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, relay 9%. relay was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (orchestration), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | relay | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 95 |
| 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 relay if
- You want the relay feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and relay 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 relay
Get your agents talking. Let Claude Code message Codex. Let your Hyperagent talk to your Hermes agent. Give your custom agents a way to message each other. Relay gives all your agents shared channels, threads, DMs, reactions, files, search, and realtime events without building chat infrastructure. Quick Start Relay requires Node.js 22 or newer. Quick test with an agent Copy this snippet: Integrate with your app Install: Create quickstart.ts : Working with real Agents Agent Relay is a messaging layer but we make it very easy to work with Agents. Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode retain PTY as their automatic…
read the full relay overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rancher or relay more popular?
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars and relay has 1,089. rancher has the larger community by that measure.
Are rancher and relay free?
Both are open source. rancher is licensed under Apache-2.0 and relay under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rancher and relay?
rancher is written in Go and relay 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 relay?
Choose rancher if you want the larger community (26,031 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose relay if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.