head to head · open source
Kestra vs hof
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hof has 615 stars, 48 forks, 74 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 4,798% (30,122 vs 615 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; hof is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, hof 8%. 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 | hof | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 615 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-05-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 48 |
| 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 hof if
- You want the hof feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and hof 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 hof
hof the higher order framework A tool that unifies data models, schemas, code generation, and a task engine. hof is a CLI tool you add to your workflow. Foundation in CUE Deterministic and Agentic code generation Data models that can evolve and be input to code generation Task engine based on cue/flow Agent servers and VS Code extension hof uses CUE to power the DX and implementation. We believe CUE is a great language for specifying schemas, configuration, and generally for writing anything declarative or this is a source of truth. It has good theory and comes from the same people that brought us containers…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or hof more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and hof has 615. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and hof free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and hof under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and hof?
Kestra is written in Java and hof 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 hof?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose hof if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.