head to head · open source
airflow vs redun
airflow has 47,350 GitHub stars, 18,299 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped yesterday. redun has 608 stars, 54 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. airflow leads on adoption by 7,688% (47,350 vs 608 stars). airflow is written in Python under Apache-2.0; redun is written in Python under Apache-2.0. airflow has attracted 39% as many forks as stars, redun 9%. airflow 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-science, 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 | redun | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 608 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-07-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 54 |
| 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 redun if
- You want the redun feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and redun 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 redun
yet another redundant workflow engine redun aims to be a more expressive and efficient workflow framework, built on top of the popular Python programming language. It takes the somewhat contrarian view that writing dataflows directly is unnecessarily restrictive, and by doing so we lose abstractions we have come to rely on in most modern high level languages (control flow, composability, recursion, high order functions, etc). redun's key insight is that workflows can be expressed as lazy expressions, which are then evaluated by a scheduler that performs automatic parallelization, caching, and data provenance…
read the full redun overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is airflow or redun more popular?
airflow has 47,350 GitHub stars and redun has 608. airflow has the larger community by that measure.
Are airflow and redun free?
Both are open source. airflow is licensed under Apache-2.0 and redun under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between airflow and redun?
airflow is written in Python and redun in Python. 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 redun?
Choose airflow if you want the larger community (47,350 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose redun if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.