head to head · open source
Dagu vs sidequest
Dagu has 4,542 GitHub stars, 394 forks, 67 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sidequest has 1,021 stars, 31 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. Dagu leads on adoption by 345% (4,542 vs 1,021 stars). Dagu is written in Go under GPL-3.0; sidequest is written in TypeScript under LGPL-3.0. Dagu has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, sidequest 3%. Dagu was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cron), 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
| Dagu | sidequest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 4.5K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 394 | ⑂ 31 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Dagu if
- You weight community size — 4.5K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 Dagu
Docs · CLI · API · Examples · Live demo (username/password: demouser) · Discord Dagu Dagu is a local first workflow engine for operations and internal automation. It is open source and self hostable: a single binary with a built in Web UI, no external database or message broker, running on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Define DAGs in a declarative YAML format. It natively supports shell commands, Docker containers, Kubernetes Jobs, remote commands via SSH, and more through Dagu Actions. Dagu turns existing scripts and runbooks into production workflows with scheduling, retries, human tasks, and run history. It runs…
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…
read the full sidequest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Dagu or sidequest more popular?
Dagu has 4,542 GitHub stars and sidequest has 1,021. Dagu has the larger community by that measure.
Are Dagu and sidequest free?
Both are open source. Dagu is licensed under GPL-3.0 and sidequest under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Dagu and sidequest?
Dagu is written in Go 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, Dagu or sidequest?
Choose Dagu if you want the larger community (4,542 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose sidequest if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.