head to head · open source
trivy vs sops
trivy has 37,961 GitHub stars, 691 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops has 23,147 stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. trivy leads on adoption by 64% (37,961 vs 23,147 stars). trivy is written in Go under Apache-2.0; sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0. trivy has attracted 2% as many forks as stars, sops 5%. trivy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (security), 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| trivy | sops | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 23K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 691 | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick trivy if
- You weight community size — 38K 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 sops if
- You want the sops feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sops fits your workflow better
About trivy
Trivy is an open source security scanner written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It is an Aqua Security open source project, hosted at trivy.dev, and it lives in the cloud native and DevSecOps ecosystem alongside container runtimes, Kubernetes clusters, and infrastructure as code tooling. The design separates two ideas: scanners, which describe the classes of security issue Trivy looks for, and targets, which describe where it looks. The README presents the project as a comprehensive and versatile scanner, and the topic list — containers, devsecops, docker, iac, infrastructure as code, kubernetes…
read the full trivy overview →
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.
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Cloud Infrastructure Management projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Cloud Infrastructure Management field.
Frequently asked questions
Is trivy or sops more popular?
trivy has 37,961 GitHub stars and sops has 23,147. trivy has the larger community by that measure.
Are trivy and sops free?
Both are open source. trivy is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sops under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between trivy and sops?
trivy is written in Go and sops 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, trivy or sops?
Choose trivy if you want the larger community (37,961 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sops if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.