head to head · open source
cadence vs superplane
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars, 915 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. superplane has 7,510 stars, 639 forks, 617 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cadence leads on adoption by 26% (9,446 vs 7,510 stars). cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0; superplane is written in Go under Apache-2.0. cadence has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, superplane 9%. superplane 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 | superplane | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.4K | ★ 7.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 915 | ⑂ 639 |
| 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 superplane if
- You want the superplane 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 superplane 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 superplane
SuperPlane is an open source control plane for automating routine software engineering work, distributed under the Apache License 2.0 and written primarily in Go. It describes itself as an "open source factory for one shot engineering," and it lives in the DevOps, platform engineering and workflow automation ecosystem. The project is currently in beta, with its source, releases and issue tracker hosted on GitHub.
read the full superplane overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or superplane more popular?
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars and superplane has 7,510. cadence has the larger community by that measure.
Are cadence and superplane free?
Both are open source. cadence is licensed under Apache-2.0 and superplane under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cadence and superplane?
cadence is written in Go and superplane 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, cadence or superplane?
Choose cadence if you want the larger community (9,446 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose superplane if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.