head to head · open source
cadence vs argo-events
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars, 915 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. argo-events has 2,694 stars, 839 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped today. cadence leads on adoption by 251% (9,446 vs 2,694 stars). cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0; argo-events is written in Go under Apache-2.0. cadence has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, argo-events 31%. argo-events was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (workflow-automation, workflows), 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
| cadence | argo-events | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.4K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 915 | ⑂ 839 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cadence if
- You weight community size — 9.4K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick argo-events if
- You want the argo-events 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 argo-events fits your workflow better
About cadence
Cadence is an open source orchestration engine for running asynchronous, long running business logic in a fault tolerant way. Written in Go under the Apache 2.0 license, it lives in the distributed systems and workflow automation space, and the project has been open source since 2017. This repository holds the core engine plus supporting tools: the CLI, schema management, a benchmark suite, and a canary. Client libraries for Go and Java are official, while Python and Ruby SDKs come from the community, and iWF can be layered on top as a DSL framework.
read the full cadence overview →
About argo-events
Argo Events is an Apache 2.0 licensed, Go based event driven workflow automation framework that runs on Kubernetes and turns more than 20 kinds of events into more than 10 kinds of automated actions.
read the full argo-events overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or argo-events more popular?
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars and argo-events has 2,694. cadence has the larger community by that measure.
Are cadence and argo-events free?
Both are open source. cadence is licensed under Apache-2.0 and argo-events under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cadence and argo-events?
cadence is written in Go and argo-events 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, cadence or argo-events?
Choose cadence if you want the larger community (9,446 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose argo-events if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.