head to head · open source
Kestra vs cloudstack
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cloudstack has 3,124 stars, 1,417 forks, 1,048 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Kestra leads on adoption by 864% (30,122 vs 3,124 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; cloudstack is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, cloudstack 45%. Kestra 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Kestra | cloudstack | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 cloudstack if
- You want the cloudstack feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and cloudstack 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 cloudstack
Apache CloudStack Who Uses CloudStack? Demo Getting Started Getting Source Repository Documentation News and Events Getting Involved and Contributing Reporting Security Vulnerabilities License Notice of Cryptographic Software Star History Contributors Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. CloudStack is used by a number of service providers to offer public cloud services, and by many companies to provide an on premises (private) cloud offering…
read the full cloudstack overview →
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 Kestra or cloudstack more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and cloudstack has 3,124. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and cloudstack free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cloudstack under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and cloudstack?
Kestra is written in Java and cloudstack in Java. 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 cloudstack?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cloudstack if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.