head to head · open source
Kestra vs dagster
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagster has 16,364 stars, 2,395 forks, 2,589 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 84% (30,122 vs 16,364 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; dagster is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, dagster 15%. Kestra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (data-engineering, data-orchestrator, etl), 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 | dagster | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 16K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 2.4K |
| 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 dagster if
- You want the dagster feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and dagster 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 dagster
Dagster is a cloud native data pipeline orchestrator for the whole development lifecycle, with integrated lineage and observability, a declarative programming model, and best in class testability. It is designed for developing and maintaining data assets , such as tables, data sets, machine learning models, and reports. With Dagster, you declare—as Python functions—the data assets that you want to build. Dagster then helps you run your functions at the right time and keep your assets up to date. Here is an example of a graph of three assets defined in Python: The graph loaded into Dagster's web UI: Dagster is…
read the full dagster overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or dagster more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and dagster has 16,364. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and dagster free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dagster under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and dagster?
Kestra is written in Java and dagster in Python. 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 dagster?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dagster if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.