head to head · open source
wtf vs dagger
wtf has 17,139 GitHub stars, 867 forks, 107 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. dagger has 16,573 stars, 946 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped yesterday. wtf leads on adoption by 3% (17,139 vs 16,573 stars). wtf is written in Go under MPL-2.0; dagger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. wtf has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, dagger 6%. dagger 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
| wtf | dagger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 17K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-21 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 867 | ⑂ 946 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick wtf if
- You weight community size — 17K 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 dagger if
- You want the dagger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and dagger fits your workflow better
About wtf
:rotating light: :warning: This project is going through some changes as we prepare for v1.0. This includes a rename from WTF to Tessera ! Stay tuned! :warning: :rotating light: WTF (aka 'wtfutil') is the personal information dashboard for your terminal, providing at a glance access to your very important but infrequently needed stats and data. Used by thousands of developers and tech people around the world, WTF is free and open source. To support the continued use and development of WTF, please consider sponsoring WTF via GitHub Sponsors. Are you a contributor or sponsor? Awesome! See here for how you can…
About dagger
Dagger: a better way to ship Dagger is a platform for automating software delivery. It can build, test and ship any codebase, reliably and at scale. Dagger runs locally, in your CI server, or directly in the cloud. Why Dagger? Dagger makes your software delivery programmable , local first , repeatable and observable . Programmable . Shell scripts and proprietary YAML are no longer acceptable for automating software delivery. Dagger provides: a complete execution engine and system API; SDKs for 8 languages; an interactive REPL; a rich ecosystem of reusable modules; and more. Local first . Once you automate a task…
read the full dagger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is wtf or dagger more popular?
wtf has 17,139 GitHub stars and dagger has 16,573. wtf has the larger community by that measure.
Are wtf and dagger free?
Both are open source. wtf is licensed under MPL-2.0 and dagger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between wtf and dagger?
wtf is written in Go and dagger 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, wtf or dagger?
Choose wtf if you want the larger community (17,139 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose dagger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.