head to head · open source
conductor vs tork
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars, 1,010 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tork has 817 stars, 63 forks, 20 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. conductor leads on adoption by 3,842% (32,207 vs 817 stars). conductor is written in Java under Apache-2.0; tork is written in Go under MIT. conductor has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, tork 8%. conductor was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (workflow-engine), 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| conductor | tork | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 817 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-07-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 63 |
| 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 tork if
- You want the tork feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tork 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 tork
Tork is a lightweight, distributed workflow engine written in Go and released under the MIT license. It runs each task of a job as a script inside its own container, so work is defined in YAML rather than as compiled code. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and uses Docker, Podman, or a plain shell as its task runtime, with PostgreSQL as the datastore and a message broker such as RabbitMQ for distributed operation.
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Orchestration & Scheduling projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Orchestration & Scheduling field.
Frequently asked questions
Is conductor or tork more popular?
conductor has 32,207 GitHub stars and tork has 817. conductor has the larger community by that measure.
Are conductor and tork free?
Both are open source. conductor is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tork under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between conductor and tork?
conductor is written in Java and tork 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 tork?
Choose conductor if you want the larger community (32,207 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tork if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.