head to head · open source
airflow vs conduit
airflow has 47,350 GitHub stars, 18,299 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped yesterday. conduit has 618 stars, 67 forks, 123 open issues and last shipped yesterday. airflow leads on adoption by 7,562% (47,350 vs 618 stars). airflow is written in Python under Apache-2.0; conduit is written in Go under Apache-2.0. airflow has attracted 39% as many forks as stars, conduit 11%. conduit was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (data-engineering, data-integration, etl), 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
| airflow | conduit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 618 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 67 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick airflow if
- You weight community size — 47K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick conduit if
- You want the conduit 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 conduit fits your workflow better
About airflow
Apache Airflow Apache Airflow (or simply Airflow) is a platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows. When workflows are defined as code, they become more maintainable, versionable, testable, and collaborative. Use Airflow to author workflows (Dags) that orchestrate tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command line utilities make performing complex surgeries on Dags a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress, and troubleshoot issues when…
read the full airflow overview →
About conduit
Conduit Data Integration for Production Data Stores. :dizzy: Overview Conduit is a data streaming tool written in Go. It aims to provide the best user experience for building and running real time data pipelines. Conduit comes with common connectors, processors and observability data out of the box. Conduit pipelines are built out of simple building blocks which run in their own goroutines and are connected using Go channels. This makes Conduit pipelines incredibly performant on multi core machines. Conduit guarantees the order of received records won't change, it also takes care of consistency by propagating…
read the full conduit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is airflow or conduit more popular?
airflow has 47,350 GitHub stars and conduit has 618. airflow has the larger community by that measure.
Are airflow and conduit free?
Both are open source. airflow is licensed under Apache-2.0 and conduit under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between airflow and conduit?
airflow is written in Python and conduit 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, airflow or conduit?
Choose airflow if you want the larger community (47,350 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose conduit if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.