head to head · open source
Toonflow-app vs cadence
Toonflow-app has 17,528 GitHub stars, 3,105 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cadence has 9,491 stars, 924 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Toonflow-app leads on adoption by 85% (17,528 vs 9,491 stars). Toonflow-app is written in TypeScript under MIT; cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Toonflow-app has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, cadence 10%. cadence was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Toonflow-app | cadence | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 9.5K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-13 | 2026-10-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 924 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Toonflow-app if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cadence if
- You want the cadence 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 cadence fits your workflow better
About Toonflow-app
Toonflow is an MIT licensed, open source AI creative platform for short drama, comic drama and short video production that unites scriptwriting, asset management and image and video generation on a single infinite canvas, made for creators and teams who want that workflow running on their own hardware rather than inside a closed hosted service.
read the full Toonflow-app overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Toonflow-app or cadence more popular?
Toonflow-app has 17,528 GitHub stars and cadence has 9,491. Toonflow-app has the larger community by that measure.
Are Toonflow-app and cadence free?
Both are open source. Toonflow-app is licensed under MIT and cadence under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Toonflow-app and cadence?
Toonflow-app is written in TypeScript and cadence 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, Toonflow-app or cadence?
Choose Toonflow-app if you want the larger community (17,528 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cadence if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.