head to head · open source
conductor vs Bacalhau
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars, 1,010 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Bacalhau has 871 stars, 101 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. conductor leads on adoption by 3,598% (32,207 vs 871 stars). conductor is written in Java under Apache-2.0; Bacalhau is written in Go under Apache-2.0. conductor has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, Bacalhau 12%. conductor 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
| conductor | Bacalhau | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 871 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 101 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick conductor if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Bacalhau if
- You want the Bacalhau 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 Bacalhau fits your workflow better
About conductor
Conductor is an Apache 2.0 licensed, event driven agentic workflow engine written in Java that provides durable and highly resilient execution for applications and AI agents, aimed at teams running microservices, AI agents, and adaptive workflow graphs that need orchestration they can version, inspect, and recover.
read the full conductor overview →
About Bacalhau
Bacalhau is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed distributed compute orchestrator written in Go that brings computation to the data rather than moving data to computation, built for data engineers, data scientists, bioinformatics teams and infrastructure operators who run batch, edge and cross organizational workloads at petabyte scale.
read the full Bacalhau overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is conductor or Bacalhau more popular?
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars and Bacalhau has 871. conductor has the larger community by that measure.
Are conductor and Bacalhau free?
Both are open source. conductor is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Bacalhau under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between conductor and Bacalhau?
conductor is written in Java and Bacalhau 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, conductor or Bacalhau?
Choose conductor if you want the larger community (32,207 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Bacalhau if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.