head to head · open source
conductor vs sidequest
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars, 1,009 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped today. sidequest has 1,015 stars, 25 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. conductor leads on adoption by 3,073% (32,207 vs 1,015 stars). conductor is written in Java under Apache-2.0; sidequest is written in TypeScript under LGPL-3.0. conductor has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, sidequest 2%. 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 | sidequest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Java | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 25 |
| 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 sidequest if
- You want the sidequest feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and sidequest 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 sidequest
Sidequest Sidequest is a Redis free background job processor for Node.js . It persists jobs in the database you already run (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB), so you get durable, distributed background processing without standing up Redis. It is a production grade BullMQ and pg boss alternative, with a built in web dashboard. At a glance Runtime: Node.js ( = 22.6.0). Does not run on Bun yet. Storage: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB. Jobs are durable and persisted in your database , not in memory. SQLite is recommended for local development and tests. Distribution: runs across multiple nodes against on…
read the full sidequest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is conductor or sidequest more popular?
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars and sidequest has 1,015. conductor has the larger community by that measure.
Are conductor and sidequest free?
Both are open source. conductor is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sidequest under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between conductor and sidequest?
conductor is written in Java and sidequest in TypeScript. 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 sidequest?
Choose conductor if you want the larger community (32,207 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sidequest if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.