head to head · open source
teleport vs tfsec
teleport has 21,061 GitHub stars, 2,181 forks, 3,262 open issues and last shipped 14 days ago. tfsec has 7,059 stars, 560 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. teleport leads on adoption by 198% (21,061 vs 7,059 stars). teleport is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; tfsec is written in Go under MIT. teleport has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, tfsec 8%. teleport was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (go), 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 | tfsec | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-20 | 2026-03-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 560 |
| 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 tfsec if
- You want the tfsec feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tfsec 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 tfsec
📣 tfsec to Trivy Migration As part of our goal to provide a comprehensive open source security solution for all, we have been consolidating all of our scanning related efforts in one place, and that is Trivy. Over the past year, tfsec has laid the foundations to Trivy's IaC & misconfigurations scanning capabilities, including Terraform scanning, which has been natively supported in Trivy for a long time now. Going forward we want to encourage the tfsec community to transition over to Trivy. Moving to Trivy gives you the same excellent Terraform scanning engine, with some extra benefits: 1. Access to more…
read the full tfsec overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is teleport or tfsec more popular?
teleport has 21,061 GitHub stars and tfsec has 7,059. teleport has the larger community by that measure.
Are teleport and tfsec free?
Both are open source. teleport is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and tfsec under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between teleport and tfsec?
teleport is written in Go and tfsec 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, teleport or tfsec?
Choose teleport if you want the larger community (21,061 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose tfsec if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.