head to head · open source
Archon vs sidequest
Archon has 23,505 GitHub stars, 3,474 forks, 321 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. sidequest has 1,015 stars, 25 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. Archon leads on adoption by 2,216% (23,505 vs 1,015 stars). Archon is written in TypeScript under MIT; sidequest is written in TypeScript under LGPL-3.0. Archon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, sidequest 2%. Archon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Archon | sidequest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 24K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | MIT | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 25 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Archon if
- You weight community size — 24K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick sidequest if
- You want the sidequest feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and sidequest fits your workflow better
About Archon
Archon is an open source workflow engine for AI coding agents, written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license. It lives in the AI coding ecosystem, alongside tools such as Claude Code, and is distributed through the Bun runtime and the GitHub CLI. The project describes itself as a harness builder: it lets a developer encode a development process as a YAML workflow and then run that workflow reliably across projects. Workflows are stored in a .archon/workflows/ directory and committed to the repository, so the same definition can be invoked from the CLI, a web UI, Slack, Telegram, or GitHub.…
read the full Archon overview →
About sidequest
Sidequest is a Redis free background job processor for Node.js that persists jobs in the PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB database an application already runs, aimed at teams that need durable, distributed queue processing without operating Redis.
read the full sidequest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Archon or sidequest more popular?
Archon has 23,505 GitHub stars and sidequest has 1,015. Archon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Archon and sidequest free?
Both are open source. Archon is licensed under MIT and sidequest under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Archon and sidequest?
Archon is written in TypeScript and sidequest in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Archon or sidequest?
Choose Archon if you want the larger community (23,505 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose sidequest if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.