head to head · open source
Kestra vs rtic
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rtic has 2,429 stars, 267 forks, 58 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Kestra leads on adoption by 1,140% (30,122 vs 2,429 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; rtic is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, rtic 11%. 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 | rtic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 267 |
| 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 rtic if
- You want the rtic feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and rtic 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 rtic
Real Time Interrupt driven Concurrency The hardware accelerated Rust RTOS A concurrency framework for building real time systems. Features Tasks as the unit of concurrency [^1]. Tasks can be event triggered (fired in response to asynchronous stimuli) or spawned by the application on demand. Message passing between tasks. Specifically, messages can be passed to software tasks at spawn time. A timer queue [^2]. Software tasks can be delayed or scheduled to continue running at some time in the future. This feature can be used to implement periodic tasks. Support for prioritization of tasks and, thus, preemptive…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or rtic more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and rtic has 2,429. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and rtic free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rtic under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and rtic?
Kestra is written in Java and rtic in Rust. 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 rtic?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rtic if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.