head to head · open source
conductor vs earthly
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars, 1,010 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. earthly has 12,047 stars, 457 forks, 744 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. conductor leads on adoption by 167% (32,207 vs 12,047 stars). conductor is written in Java under Apache-2.0; earthly is written in Go under MPL-2.0. conductor has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, earthly 4%. 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 | earthly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-10-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 457 |
| 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 earthly if
- You want the earthly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and earthly 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 earthly
Earthly is a container based build and CI/CD framework that runs every pipeline inside containers so the same build executes identically on a laptop, a colleague's machine, or any CI system, and it is built for engineers and platform teams who maintain build logic across monorepos or polyrepos and are comfortable with Dockerfile and Makefile style syntax.
read the full earthly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is conductor or earthly more popular?
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars and earthly has 12,047. conductor has the larger community by that measure.
Are conductor and earthly free?
Both are open source. conductor is licensed under Apache-2.0 and earthly under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between conductor and earthly?
conductor is written in Java and earthly 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 earthly?
Choose conductor if you want the larger community (32,207 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose earthly if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.