head to head · open source
Kestra vs libfork
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. libfork has 901 stars, 46 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 3,243% (30,122 vs 901 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; libfork is written in C++ under MPL-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, libfork 5%. 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 | libfork | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 901 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-05-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 46 |
| 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 libfork if
- You want the libfork feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and libfork 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 libfork
Welcome to libfork 🍴 A bleeding edge, lock free, wait free, continuation stealing coroutine tasking library. Now supplying 🌵! Libfork is primarily an abstraction for fully portable, strict, fork join parallelism. This is made possible without the use of any macros/inline assembly using C++20's coroutines. Ultra fine grained parallelism (the ability to spawn tasks with very low overhead) is enabled by an innovative implementation of an (almost) non allocating cactus stack utilizing segmented stacks . Libfork presents a cross platform API that decouples scheduling tasks (a customization point) from writing…
read the full libfork overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or libfork more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and libfork has 901. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and libfork free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and libfork under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and libfork?
Kestra is written in Java and libfork in C++. 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 libfork?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose libfork if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.