head to head · open source
sops vs boto3
sops has 23,147 GitHub stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. boto3 has 9,902 stars, 1,995 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops leads on adoption by 134% (23,147 vs 9,902 stars). sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0; boto3 is written in Python under Apache-2.0. sops has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, boto3 20%. boto3 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 | boto3 | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 9.9K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 2.0K |
| 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 boto3 if
- You want the boto3 feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and boto3 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 boto3
Boto3 is the Amazon Web Services Software Development Kit for Python, letting Python developers write software that uses AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.
read the full boto3 overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is sops or boto3 more popular?
sops has 23,147 GitHub stars and boto3 has 9,902. sops has the larger community by that measure.
Are sops and boto3 free?
Both are open source. sops is licensed under MPL-2.0 and boto3 under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between sops and boto3?
sops is written in Go and boto3 in Python. 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 boto3?
Choose sops if you want the larger community (23,147 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose boto3 if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.