head to head · open source
Kestra vs rulego
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rulego has 1,632 stars, 162 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 1,746% (30,122 vs 1,632 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; rulego is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, rulego 10%. Kestra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (automation), 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 | rulego | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 162 |
| 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 rulego if
- You want the rulego 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 rulego 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 rulego
RuleGo English 简体中文 Official Website Docs Contribution Guide RuleGo is a lightweight, high performance, embedded, orchestrable component based rule engine built on the Go language. It can help you quickly build loosely coupled and flexible systems that can respond and adjust to changes in business requirements in real time. RuleGo also provides a large number of reusable components that support the aggregation, filtering, distribution, transformation, enrichment, and execution of various actions on data, and can also interact and integrate with various protocols and systems. It has a wide range of application…
read the full rulego overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or rulego more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and rulego has 1,632. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and rulego free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rulego under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and rulego?
Kestra is written in Java and rulego 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 rulego?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rulego if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.