head to head · open source
sops vs task
sops has 23,147 GitHub stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. task has 16,157 stars, 910 forks, 190 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops leads on adoption by 43% (23,147 vs 16,157 stars). sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0; task is written in Go under MIT. sops has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, task 6%. task 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 | task | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 16K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 910 |
| 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 task if
- You want the task feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and task 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 task
Task is a fast, cross platform task runner and build tool, written in Go and inspired by Make, for developers and DevOps engineers who want to define and run project commands without maintaining a hand written Makefile.
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Frequently asked questions
Is sops or task more popular?
sops has 23,147 GitHub stars and task has 16,157. sops has the larger community by that measure.
Are sops and task free?
Both are open source. sops is licensed under MPL-2.0 and task under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between sops and task?
sops is written in Go and task in Go. 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 task?
Choose sops if you want the larger community (23,147 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose task if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.