head to head · open source
cadence vs shepherd
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars, 915 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. shepherd has 2,432 stars, 211 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. cadence leads on adoption by 288% (9,446 vs 2,432 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.
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Side by side
| cadence | shepherd | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.4K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 915 | ⑂ 211 |
| 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 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 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 shepherd
Shepherd is a Python runtime substrate that records an agent's execution as a reversible, Git like trace so that meta agents can observe, fork, replay, and revert any run — built for engineers and researchers who supervise, optimise, or train other agents.
read the full shepherd overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or shepherd more popular?
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars and shepherd has 2,432. 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 (9,446 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose shepherd if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.