head to head · open source
Kestra vs haystack
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. haystack has 26,913 stars, 3,384 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Kestra leads on adoption by 12% (30,122 vs 26,913 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; haystack is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, haystack 13%. Kestra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agents), 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 | haystack | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 27K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 3.4K |
| 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 haystack if
- You want the haystack 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 haystack 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 haystack
🎉🎊✨ Haystack 3.0 is out! ✨🎊🎉 Read the announcement here! 🥳 🎈 🎆 🪅 🎇 🍾 🥂 🎁 🌈 Haystack is an open source AI orchestration framework for building production ready LLM applications in Python. Design modular pipelines and agent workflows with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory, and generation. Build scalable RAG systems, multimodal applications, semantic search, question answering, and autonomous agents, all in a transparent architecture that lets you experiment, customize deeply, and deploy with confidence. Table of Contents Installation Documentation Features Haystack Enterprise: Support &…
read the full haystack overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or haystack more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and haystack has 26,913. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and haystack free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and haystack under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and haystack?
Kestra is written in Java and haystack 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 haystack?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose haystack if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.