head to head · open source
cadence vs Autonomous-Company
cadence has 9,491 GitHub stars, 924 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Autonomous-Company has 3,128 stars, 493 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cadence leads on adoption by 203% (9,491 vs 3,128 stars). cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Autonomous-Company is written in Python under MIT. cadence has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Autonomous-Company 16%. cadence 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 | Autonomous-Company | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.5K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-13 | 2026-10-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 924 | ⑂ 493 |
| 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 Autonomous-Company if
- You want the Autonomous-Company feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Autonomous-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 Autonomous-Company
Autonomous Company is an MIT licensed, self hosted Python framework that runs a continuous loop of AI agent roles on a personal Windows, Linux, or macOS machine, and it is aimed at developers and operators who want an always on AI team working toward goals, permissions, and budgets they configure themselves.
read the full Autonomous-Company overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or Autonomous-Company more popular?
cadence has 9,491 GitHub stars and Autonomous-Company has 3,128. cadence has the larger community by that measure.
Are cadence and Autonomous-Company free?
Both are open source. cadence is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Autonomous-Company under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cadence and Autonomous-Company?
cadence is written in Go and Autonomous-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 Autonomous-Company?
Choose cadence if you want the larger community (9,491 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Autonomous-Company if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.