head to head · open source
cadence vs argo-events
cadence has 9,536 GitHub stars, 930 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped yesterday. argo-events has 2,710 stars, 849 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. cadence leads on adoption by 252% (9,536 vs 2,710 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%. cadence 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 | ★ 9.5K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 930 | ⑂ 849 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cadence if
- You weight community size — 9.5K 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 Cadence Workflow is an open source platform since 2017 for building and running scalable, fault tolerant, and long running workflows. This repository contains the core orchestration engine and tools including CLI, schema managment, benchmark and canary. Getting Started Cadence backend consists of multiple services, a database (Cassandra/MySQL/PostgreSQL) and optionally Kafka+Elasticsearch. As a user, you need a worker which contains your workflow implementation. Once you have Cadence backend and worker(s) running, you can trigger workflows by using SDKs or via CLI. 1. Start cadence backend components…
read the full cadence overview →
About argo-events
Argo Events The Event driven Workflow Automation Framework What is Argo Events? Argo Events is an event driven workflow automation framework for Kubernetes. It allows you to trigger 10 different actions (such as the creation of Kubernetes objects, invoke workflows or serverless workloads) on over 20 different events (such as webhook, S3 drop, cron schedule, messaging queues e.g. Kafka, GCP PubSub, SNS, SQS). Features Supports events from 20+ event sources and 10+ triggers. Ability to customize business level constraint logic for workflow automation. Manage everything from simple, linear, real time to complex…
read the full argo-events overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or argo-events more popular?
cadence has 9,536 GitHub stars and argo-events has 2,710. 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 (9,536 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.