head to head · open source
Botpress vs cadence
Botpress has 14,920 GitHub stars, 2,293 forks, 52 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cadence has 9,446 stars, 915 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Botpress leads on adoption by 58% (14,920 vs 9,446 stars). Botpress is written in TypeScript under MIT; cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Botpress has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, cadence 10%. Botpress was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Botpress | cadence | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 915 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Botpress if
- You weight community size — 15K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cadence if
- You want the cadence 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 cadence fits your workflow better
About Botpress
Botpress is open source hub to build and deploy GPT/LLM agents. It lives in Botpress Cloud ecosystem. Project uses TypeScript, MIT license, npm packages @botpress/cli and @botpress/sdk. Repository contains public integrations, devtools, example bots as code, and plugins for Botpress Studio, marked coming soon.
read the full Botpress overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Botpress or cadence more popular?
Botpress has 14,920 GitHub stars and cadence has 9,446. Botpress has the larger community by that measure.
Are Botpress and cadence free?
Both are open source. Botpress is licensed under MIT and cadence under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Botpress and cadence?
Botpress is written in TypeScript and cadence 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, Botpress or cadence?
Choose Botpress if you want the larger community (14,920 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cadence if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.