head to head · open source
conductor vs ergo
conductor has 32,401 GitHub stars, 1,051 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ergo has 4,693 stars, 193 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. conductor leads on adoption by 590% (32,401 vs 4,693 stars). conductor is written in Java under Apache-2.0; ergo is written in Go under MIT. conductor has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, ergo 4%. conductor was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (distributed-systems), 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 | ergo | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 193 |
| 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 ergo if
- You want the ergo feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ergo fits your workflow better
About conductor
Conductor Durable Execution for Workflows and Agents Build agents that adapt. Run graphs that endure. Conductor is an open source durable execution platform for microservices, AI agents, and adaptive workflow graphs. It turns runtime choices—loops, branching, fan out, tool calls, approvals, retries, and cancellation—into durable, inspectable execution. It originated at Netflix and is actively maintained by Orkes and the community. Get Running in 60 Seconds Prerequisites: Node.js v16+ and Java 21+ must be installed. Open — your server is running with the built in ui next UI. Upgrading from a previous version? The…
read the full conductor overview →
About ergo
Actor model for Go. Build distributed systems without the distributed systems headache. Goroutines and channels work great until your system grows. Then come the mutexes, the race conditions, the service discovery configs, the retry logic, the connection pool management. Ergo replaces all of that with one model: isolated processes that communicate through messages, supervised automatically, addressable across any cluster. Inspired by Erlang/OTP. Zero external dependencies. Pure Go. The core idea in 30 seconds No locks. No race conditions. Sequential message handling is the guarantee. Why not just goroutines +…
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Frequently asked questions
Is conductor or ergo more popular?
conductor has 32,401 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,693. conductor has the larger community by that measure.
Are conductor and ergo free?
Both are open source. conductor is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ergo under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between conductor and ergo?
conductor is written in Java and ergo 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 ergo?
Choose conductor if you want the larger community (32,401 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.