head to head · open source
Kestra vs sidequest
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sidequest has 1,020 stars, 31 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 2,853% (30,122 vs 1,020 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; sidequest is written in TypeScript under LGPL-3.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, sidequest 3%. 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 | sidequest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Java | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 31 |
| 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 sidequest if
- You want the sidequest feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and sidequest 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 sidequest
Sidequest Sidequest is a Redis free background job processor for Node.js . It persists jobs in the database you already run (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB), so you get durable, distributed background processing without standing up Redis. It is a production grade BullMQ and pg boss alternative, with a built in web dashboard. At a glance Runtime: Node.js ( = 22.6.0). Does not run on Bun yet. Storage: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB. Jobs are durable and persisted in your database , not in memory. SQLite is recommended for local development and tests. Distribution: runs across multiple nodes against…
read the full sidequest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or sidequest more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and sidequest has 1,020. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and sidequest free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sidequest under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and sidequest?
Kestra is written in Java and sidequest in TypeScript. 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 sidequest?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sidequest if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.