head to head · open source
tfsec vs rundeck
tfsec has 7,061 GitHub stars, 560 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. rundeck has 6,356 stars, 989 forks, 81 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. tfsec leads on adoption by 11% (7,061 vs 6,356 stars). tfsec is written in Go under MIT; rundeck is written in Groovy under Apache-2.0. tfsec has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, rundeck 16%. rundeck was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (devops, hacktoberfest), 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
| tfsec | rundeck | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.1K | ★ 6.4K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Groovy |
| Last push | 2026-03-25 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 560 | ⑂ 989 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick tfsec if
- You weight community size — 7.1K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick rundeck if
- You want the rundeck feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Groovy
- You evaluated both and rundeck fits your workflow better
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 →
About rundeck
Execute workflows across your existing automations or quickly automate previously manual procedures. Rundeck by PagerDuty is an open source runbook automation service with a web console, command line tools and a WebAPI. It lets you easily standardize tasks to improve operational quality by deploying automation across a set of nodes. Visit the Website Read the latest documentation Get help from the Community Install Rundeck See the Release Notes for the latest version information. How To Build: Primary build is supported with gradle. More info in the wiki. Requirements: Java 11, NodeJs 18 Cloudsmith…
read the full rundeck overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is tfsec or rundeck more popular?
tfsec has 7,061 GitHub stars and rundeck has 6,356. tfsec has the larger community by that measure.
Are tfsec and rundeck free?
Both are open source. tfsec is licensed under MIT and rundeck under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between tfsec and rundeck?
tfsec is written in Go and rundeck in Groovy. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, tfsec or rundeck?
Choose tfsec if you want the larger community (7,061 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose rundeck if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.