head to head · open source
Dagu vs sidequest
Dagu has 4,036 GitHub stars, 339 forks, 67 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sidequest has 1,015 stars, 25 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. Dagu leads on adoption by 298% (4,036 vs 1,015 stars). Dagu is written in Go under GPL-3.0; sidequest is written in TypeScript under LGPL-3.0. Dagu has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, sidequest 2%. 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 | ★ 4.0K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 339 | ⑂ 25 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Dagu if
- You weight community size — 4.0K 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
Dagu is local first workflow engine. It targets operations and internal automation. It lives in Infrastructure & Operations / Orchestration & Scheduling. It is Go project under GPL 3.0. It provides single binary with built in Web UI. It needs no external database or message broker. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows. GitHub metadata lists 3982 stars, 332 forks, 0 contributors, 67 open issues, repo age 0 years, last push 2026 09 14.
About sidequest
Sidequest is a Redis free background job processor for Node.js that persists jobs in the PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB database an application already runs, aimed at teams that need durable, distributed queue processing without operating Redis.
read the full sidequest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Dagu or sidequest more popular?
Dagu has 4,036 GitHub stars and sidequest has 1,015. 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 (4,036 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.