head to head · open source
conductor vs ergo
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars, 1,010 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ergo has 4,660 stars, 191 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. conductor leads on adoption by 591% (32,207 vs 4,660 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 | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 191 |
| 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 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 ergo
Ergo is an actor based framework for Go that brings network transparency to event driven architecture, drawing direct inspiration from Erlang/OTP. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is distributed as a pure Go library with zero external dependencies. The framework models every unit of work as an isolated process that communicates only through messages, so shared state, mutexes, and race conditions are eliminated by design rather than managed by convention.
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Frequently asked questions
Is conductor or ergo more popular?
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,660. 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 (32,207 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.