head to head · open source
Kestra vs ergo
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ergo has 4,693 stars, 193 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 542% (30,122 vs 4,693 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; ergo is written in Go under MIT. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, ergo 4%. 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.
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Side by side
| Kestra | ergo | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 193 |
| 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 ergo if
- You want the ergo feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ergo 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 ergo
Actor model for Go. Build distributed systems without the distributed systems headache. Goroutines and channels work great until your system grows. Then come the mutexes, the race conditions, the service discovery configs, the retry logic, the connection pool management. Ergo replaces all of that with one model: isolated processes that communicate through messages, supervised automatically, addressable across any cluster. Inspired by Erlang/OTP. Zero external dependencies. Pure Go. The core idea in 30 seconds No locks. No race conditions. Sequential message handling is the guarantee. Why not just goroutines +…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or ergo more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,693. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and ergo free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ergo under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and ergo?
Kestra is written in Java and ergo 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 ergo?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.