head to head · open source
sops vs aws-cdk
sops has 23,147 GitHub stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. aws-cdk has 12,899 stars, 4,631 forks, 2,863 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops leads on adoption by 79% (23,147 vs 12,899 stars). sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0; aws-cdk is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. sops has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, aws-cdk 36%. aws-cdk was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (aws), 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
| sops | aws-cdk | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 13K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 4.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick sops if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick aws-cdk if
- You want the aws-cdk feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and aws-cdk fits your workflow better
About sops
SOPS, short for Secrets OPerationS, is an editor of encrypted files written in Go and released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. It handles YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats, and it encrypts those files using AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, HuaweiCloud KMS, age, or PGP. The project lives in the cloud native infrastructure ecosystem: it started at Mozilla in 2015, was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2023, and is now a CNCF Sandbox project under a new group of maintainers. It carries 23,121 stars and 1,080 forks, with documentation hosted at getsops.io.
About aws-cdk
AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open source software development framework for defining cloud infrastructure in code and provisioning it through AWS CloudFormation. It lives in the AWS ecosystem and ships under the Apache 2.0 license, with the core implementation written in TypeScript. The framework offers a high level object oriented abstraction that lets developers define AWS resources imperatively using modern programming languages rather than writing raw CloudFormation templates by hand.
read the full aws-cdk overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is sops or aws-cdk more popular?
sops has 23,147 GitHub stars and aws-cdk has 12,899. sops has the larger community by that measure.
Are sops and aws-cdk free?
Both are open source. sops is licensed under MPL-2.0 and aws-cdk under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between sops and aws-cdk?
sops is written in Go and aws-cdk in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, sops or aws-cdk?
Choose sops if you want the larger community (23,147 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose aws-cdk if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.