head to head · open source
cadence vs daml
cadence has 9,536 GitHub stars, 930 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped yesterday. daml has 924 stars, 265 forks, 753 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cadence leads on adoption by 932% (9,536 vs 924 stars). cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0; daml is written in Haskell under Apache-2.0. cadence has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, daml 29%. 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 | daml | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.5K | ★ 924 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Haskell |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 930 | ⑂ 265 |
| 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 daml if
- You want the daml feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Haskell
- You evaluated both and daml 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 daml
See full README at sdk/README.md
More in Productivity & Utilities
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Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or daml more popular?
cadence has 9,536 GitHub stars and daml has 924. cadence has the larger community by that measure.
Are cadence and daml free?
Both are open source. cadence is licensed under Apache-2.0 and daml under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cadence and daml?
cadence is written in Go and daml in Haskell. 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 daml?
Choose cadence if you want the larger community (9,536 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose daml if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.