head to head · open source
cadence vs Auto-Company
cadence has 9,447 GitHub stars, 915 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Auto-Company has 3,094 stars, 495 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped today. cadence leads on adoption by 205% (9,447 vs 3,094 stars). cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Auto-Company is written in Python under MIT. cadence has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Auto-Company 16%. Auto-Company was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (workflow-automation), 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 | Auto-Company | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.4K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-22 | 2026-09-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 915 | ⑂ 495 |
| 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 Auto-Company if
- You want the Auto-Company feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Auto-Company 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 Auto-Company
Auto Company is an MIT licensed, self hosted Python project that runs a fully autonomous AI company on a personal computer, orchestrating 14 AI agents that ideate, decide, code, deploy and market without human intervention, for developers working on macOS, Windows/WSL or Linux.
read the full Auto-Company overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or Auto-Company more popular?
cadence has 9,447 GitHub stars and Auto-Company has 3,094. cadence has the larger community by that measure.
Are cadence and Auto-Company free?
Both are open source. cadence is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Auto-Company under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cadence and Auto-Company?
cadence is written in Go and Auto-Company 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, cadence or Auto-Company?
Choose cadence if you want the larger community (9,447 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Auto-Company if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.