head to head · open source
cadence vs shepherd
cadence has 9,536 GitHub stars, 930 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped yesterday. shepherd has 2,504 stars, 219 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. cadence leads on adoption by 281% (9,536 vs 2,504 stars). cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0; shepherd is written in Python under MIT. cadence has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, shepherd 9%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| cadence | shepherd | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.5K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 930 | ⑂ 219 |
| 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 shepherd if
- You want the shepherd feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and shepherd 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 shepherd
Shepherd: Programmable Meta Agents via Reversible Execution Traces [!IMPORTANT] Shepherd is in early alpha and under active development. APIs may still change between releases. Feedback and issues are very welcome! Install Quickstart Permissions Examples Docs Citation Shepherd is a runtime substrate for agent work that needs inspection, reversibility, and supervision. It records agent runs as durable, inspectable execution traces, with retained workspace outputs that can be reviewed before they are selected, applied, released, or discarded. Platforms. Shepherd requires Python 3.11+ . OS level grant enforcement…
read the full shepherd overview →
More in Productivity & Utilities
Related comparisons
More Automation projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Automation field.
Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or shepherd more popular?
cadence has 9,536 GitHub stars and shepherd has 2,504. cadence has the larger community by that measure.
Are cadence and shepherd free?
Both are open source. cadence is licensed under Apache-2.0 and shepherd under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cadence and shepherd?
cadence is written in Go and shepherd 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 shepherd?
Choose cadence if you want the larger community (9,536 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose shepherd if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.