head to head · open source
Kestra vs Dagu
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Dagu has 4,536 stars, 392 forks, 67 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Kestra leads on adoption by 564% (30,122 vs 4,536 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; Dagu is written in Go under GPL-3.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, Dagu 9%. Kestra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai-agents, 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 | Dagu | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 392 |
| 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 Dagu if
- You want the Dagu feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Dagu 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 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…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or Dagu more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and Dagu has 4,536. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and Dagu free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Dagu under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and Dagu?
Kestra is written in Java and Dagu 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 Dagu?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Dagu if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.