head to head · open source
cadence vs daml
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars, 915 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. daml has 917 stars, 263 forks, 753 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cadence leads on adoption by 930% (9,446 vs 917 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%. daml 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 | ★ 9.4K | ★ 917 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Haskell |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 915 | ⑂ 263 |
| 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 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 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 daml
Daml is the Daml smart contract language, an Apache 2.0 licensed, Haskell implemented language and SDK for building distributed ledger and workflow automation applications, aimed at developers who need to encode multi party agreements as executable contracts.
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Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or daml more popular?
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars and daml has 917. 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 (9,446 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.