head to head · open source
Windmill vs cadence
Windmill has 17,982 GitHub stars, 1,097 forks, 852 open issues and last shipped today. cadence has 9,446 stars, 915 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Windmill leads on adoption by 90% (17,982 vs 9,446 stars). Windmill is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Windmill has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, cadence 10%. Windmill 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
| Windmill | cadence | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 915 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Windmill if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- 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 Windmill
Windmill is an open source developer platform for internal code, including APIs, background jobs, workflows, and UIs. It lives in the self hostable low code automation ecosystem and supports Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash, SQL, GraphQL, PowerShell, Rust, and more. The project is positioned as an open source alternative to Zapier and, in the README, to Retool, Pipedream, Superblocks, and a simplified Temporal.
read the full Windmill 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 Windmill or cadence more popular?
Windmill has 17,982 GitHub stars and cadence has 9,446. Windmill has the larger community by that measure.
Are Windmill and cadence free?
Both are open source. Windmill has no licence declared in this registry, and cadence is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Windmill and cadence?
Windmill is written in Rust 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, Windmill or cadence?
Choose Windmill if you want the larger community (17,982 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose cadence if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.