head to head · open source
Kestra vs agola
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. agola has 1,630 stars, 122 forks, 71 open issues and last shipped 1.1 years ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 1,748% (30,122 vs 1,630 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; agola is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, agola 7%. Kestra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (devops), 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
| Kestra | agola | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-09-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 122 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Kestra if
- You weight community size — 30K 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 agola if
- You want the agola feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and agola fits your workflow better
About Kestra
Open source orchestration platform for data, AI, and infrastructure workflows Click on the image to learn how to get started with Kestra in 3 minutes. 🌟 What is Kestra? Kestra is an open source, event driven orchestration platform for data, AI, and infrastructure workflows. It unifies scheduled and event driven automation behind a declarative, language agnostic interface. By bringing Infrastructure as Code best practices to your data, process, and microservice pipelines, you can build reliable workflows directly from the UI in just a few lines of YAML, let the built in AI Copilot write them for you, or generate…
read the full Kestra overview →
About agola
Agola CI/CD redefined For an introduction to agola you can take a look at this post Try it See the agolademo example Features Easy to install and manage. Scalable and High Available: go from a single instance (single process) deployment to a distributed deployment. Deploy anywhere: Kubernetes, IaaS, bare metal and execute the "tasks" anywhere (currently containers executors like docker or orchestrators and Kubernetes, but easily extensible to future technologies or VMs instead of containers). Support any language, deployment system etc... (just use the right image) Integrate with multiple git providers at the…
read the full agola overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or agola more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and agola has 1,630. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and agola free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and agola under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and agola?
Kestra is written in Java and agola 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, Kestra or agola?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose agola if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.