head to head · open source
Archon vs tork
Archon has 23,505 GitHub stars, 3,474 forks, 321 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. tork has 817 stars, 63 forks, 20 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Archon leads on adoption by 2,777% (23,505 vs 817 stars). Archon is written in TypeScript under MIT; tork is written in Go under MIT. Archon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, tork 8%. Archon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (workflow-engine), 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
| Archon | tork | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 24K | ★ 817 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-07-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 63 |
| 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 tork if
- You want the tork feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tork 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 tork
Tork is a lightweight, distributed workflow engine written in Go and released under the MIT license. It runs each task of a job as a script inside its own container, so work is defined in YAML rather than as compiled code. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and uses Docker, Podman, or a plain shell as its task runtime, with PostgreSQL as the datastore and a message broker such as RabbitMQ for distributed operation.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Archon or tork more popular?
Archon has 23,505 GitHub stars and tork has 817. Archon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Archon and tork free?
Both are open source. Archon is licensed under MIT and tork under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Archon and tork?
Archon is written in TypeScript and tork 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, Archon or tork?
Choose Archon if you want the larger community (23,505 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose tork if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.