head to head · open source
Kestra vs nextflow
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nextflow has 3,520 stars, 820 forks, 422 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Kestra leads on adoption by 756% (30,122 vs 3,520 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; nextflow is written in Groovy under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, nextflow 23%. nextflow 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 | nextflow | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 3.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Groovy |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 820 |
| 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 nextflow if
- You want the nextflow feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Groovy
- You evaluated both and nextflow 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 nextflow
"Dataflow variables are spectacularly expressive in concurrent programming" Henri E. Bal , Jennifer G. Steiner , Andrew S. Tanenbaum Nextflow is a workflow system for creating scalable, portable, and reproducible workflows. It is based on the dataflow programming model, which greatly simplifies the writing of parallel and distributed pipelines, allowing you to focus on the flow of data and computation. Nextflow can deploy workflows on a variety of execution platforms, including your local machine, HPC schedulers, AWS Batch, Azure Batch, Google Cloud Batch, and Kubernetes. Additionally, it supports many ways to…
read the full nextflow overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or nextflow more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and nextflow has 3,520. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and nextflow free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and nextflow under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and nextflow?
Kestra is written in Java and nextflow in Groovy. 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 nextflow?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose nextflow if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.