head to head · open source
sops vs openebs
sops has 23,163 GitHub stars, 1,082 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. openebs has 9,813 stars, 983 forks, 37 open issues and last shipped today. sops leads on adoption by 136% (23,163 vs 9,813 stars). sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0; openebs is written in various languages under Apache-2.0. sops has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, openebs 10%. openebs was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (devops), 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 | openebs | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 9.8K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | — |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 983 |
| 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 openebs if
- You want the openebs feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- You evaluated both and openebs 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 openebs
OpenEBS is an open source, CNCF Sandbox container native storage platform that gives Kubernetes stateful applications persistent volumes through containerized storage controllers, and it is aimed at platform, infrastructure, and DevOps teams that run stateful workloads on Kubernetes.
read the full openebs overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is sops or openebs more popular?
sops has 23,163 GitHub stars and openebs has 9,813. sops has the larger community by that measure.
Are sops and openebs free?
Both are open source. sops is licensed under MPL-2.0 and openebs under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between sops and openebs?
sops is written in Go and openebs in various languages. 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 openebs?
Choose sops if you want the larger community (23,163 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose openebs if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.