head to head · open source
Windmill vs cadence
Windmill has 18,370 GitHub stars, 1,135 forks, 852 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cadence has 9,536 stars, 930 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Windmill leads on adoption by 93% (18,370 vs 9,536 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 | ★ 9.5K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 930 |
| 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
Open source developer platform for internal code: APIs, background jobs, workflows and UIs. Self hostable alternative to Retool, Pipedream, Superblocks and a simplified Temporal with autogenerated UIs and custom UIs to trigger workflows and scripts as internal apps. Scripts are turned into sharable UIs automatically, and can be composed together into flows or used into richer apps built with low code. Supported languages: Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash, SQL, GraphQL, PowerShell, Rust, and more. Try it Website Docs Discord Hub Contributing Windmill Developer platform for APIs, background jobs, workflows and UIs…
read the full Windmill overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Windmill or cadence more popular?
Windmill has 18,370 GitHub stars and cadence has 9,536. 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 (18,370 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.