head to head · open source
conductor vs cloudstack
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars, 1,009 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped today. cloudstack has 3,068 stars, 1,385 forks, 1,048 open issues and last shipped yesterday. conductor leads on adoption by 950% (32,207 vs 3,068 stars). conductor is written in Java under Apache-2.0; cloudstack is written in Java under Apache-2.0. conductor has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, cloudstack 45%. conductor was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (java), 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
| conductor | cloudstack | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 cloudstack if
- You want the cloudstack feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and cloudstack 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 cloudstack
Apache CloudStack Who Uses CloudStack? Demo Getting Started Getting Source Repository Documentation News and Events Getting Involved and Contributing Reporting Security Vulnerabilities License Notice of Cryptographic Software Star History Contributors Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. CloudStack is used by a number of service providers to offer public cloud services, and by many companies to provide an on premises (private) cloud offering, or…
read the full cloudstack overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is conductor or cloudstack more popular?
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars and cloudstack has 3,068. conductor has the larger community by that measure.
Are conductor and cloudstack free?
Both are open source. conductor is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cloudstack under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between conductor and cloudstack?
conductor is written in Java and cloudstack in Java. 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 cloudstack?
Choose conductor if you want the larger community (32,207 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cloudstack if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.