head to head · open source
teleport vs HardeningKitty
teleport has 21,061 GitHub stars, 2,181 forks, 3,262 open issues and last shipped 14 days ago. HardeningKitty has 1,876 stars, 217 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. teleport leads on adoption by 1,023% (21,061 vs 1,876 stars). teleport is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; HardeningKitty is written in PowerShell under MIT. teleport has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, HardeningKitty 12%. teleport was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (audit), 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
| teleport | HardeningKitty | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PowerShell |
| Last push | 2026-10-20 | 2026-07-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 217 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick teleport if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick HardeningKitty if
- You want the HardeningKitty feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PowerShell
- You evaluated both and HardeningKitty fits your workflow better
About teleport
Teleport provides connectivity, authentication, access controls and audit for infrastructure. You might use Teleport to: Set up single sign on (SSO) for all of your cloud and on prem infrastructure. Protect access to servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, Windows desktops, web applications, and cloud APIs without long lived keys or passwords. Establish secure tunnels to reach resources behind NATs and firewalls without VPNs or bastion hosts. Record and audit activity across SSH, Kubernetes, database, RDP, and web sessions. Apply consistent Role Based and Attribute Based Access Control (RBAC/ABAC) across users…
read the full teleport overview →
About HardeningKitty
HardeningKitty This is the stable version of HardeningKitty from the Windows Hardening Project by Michael Schneider. The stable version of HardeningKitty is signed with the code signing certificate of scip AG . Since this is the stable version, we do not accept pull requests in this repo, please send them to the development repo . HardeningKitty supports hardening of a Windows system. The configuration of the system is retrieved and assessed using a finding list. In addition, the system can be hardened according to predefined values. HardeningKitty reads settings from the registry and uses other modules to read…
read the full HardeningKitty overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is teleport or HardeningKitty more popular?
teleport has 21,061 GitHub stars and HardeningKitty has 1,876. teleport has the larger community by that measure.
Are teleport and HardeningKitty free?
Both are open source. teleport is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and HardeningKitty under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between teleport and HardeningKitty?
teleport is written in Go and HardeningKitty in PowerShell. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, teleport or HardeningKitty?
Choose teleport if you want the larger community (21,061 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose HardeningKitty if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.