nlnetlabs/unbound vs powerdns/pdns
powerdns/pdns shows stronger signals overall
As of September 2026, pdns shows healthier maintenance signals than unbound. pdns rates Healthy overall while unbound rates Mixed. unbound was committed to 1 week ago with 5+ active contributors, while pdns was committed to 1 week ago with 6+ active contributors. unbound is BSD-3-Clause-licensed while pdns is GPL-2.0-licensed. Neither has known critical or high-severity CVEs in its dependency tree.
Informational only. RepoPilot summarises public signals at the time of analysis. Not professional, security, or legal advice.
nlnetlabs/unbound
Single-maintainer risk — review before adopting
top contributor handles 93% of recent commits; dependency CVE scan unavailable
No blocking repository signals were found — inspect the evidence before forking.
Documented and popular — useful reference codebase to read through.
dependency CVE scan unavailable
- ⚠Single-maintainer risk — top contributor 93% of recent commits
- ✓Last commit 1d ago
- ✓5 active contributors
- ✓BSD-3-Clause licensed
- ✓CI configured
- ✓Tests present
Computed from maintenance signals — commit recency, contributor breadth, bus factor, license, CI, tests, cross-checked against OpenSSF Scorecard
powerdns/pdns
Strong maintenance signals
copyleft license (GPL-2.0) — review compatibility
No blocking repository signals were found — inspect the evidence before forking.
Documented and popular — useful reference codebase to read through.
No blocking repository-level signals were found; deployment review is still required.
- ⚠GPL-2.0 is copyleft — check downstream compatibility
- ✓Last commit 1d ago
- ✓6 active contributors
- ✓Distributed ownership (top contributor 33% of recent commits)
- ✓GPL-2.0 licensed
- ✓CI configured
- ✓Tests present
What would improve this?
- •Use as dependency Concerns to Mixed if: relicense under MIT/Apache-2.0 (rare for established libs)
Computed from maintenance signals — commit recency, contributor breadth, bus factor, license, CI, tests, cross-checked against dependency CVEs from deps.dev and OpenSSF Scorecard
Signal-by-signal breakdown
| unbound | pdns | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 4,864 | 4,464 |
| Last commit | 8d ago | 8d ago |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | GPL-2.0 |
| Open issues | 385 | 925 |
| Has tests | ✓ | ✓ |
| Has CI | ✓ | ✓ |
| Test coverage | 0% | 100% |
| Dependency CVEs | No CVEs | No CVEs |
| Architecture grade | — | — |
| Cycles | — | — |
| Bottom-line | Mixed signals | Healthy signals |
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