head to head · open source
Kestra vs sre
Kestra has 30,141 GitHub stars, 3,499 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sre has 1,302 stars, 204 forks, 35 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 2,215% (30,141 vs 1,302 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; sre is written in TypeScript under MIT. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, sre 16%. Kestra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agents), 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 | sre | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 204 |
| 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 sre if
- You want the sre feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and sre 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 sre
SmythOS The Linux of AI Agents Reliable Agent Engineering starts with great, open source infrastructure. This repository contains the Smyth Runtime Environment Kernel (SRE), the Software Development Kit (SDK) and Command Line Interface (CLI) for running agents and creating them with code. If you prefer visual drag & drop agent interfaces instead, check out our open source SmythOS Visual Agent Studio! Great community, support, tutorials. Start in minutes! SmythOS Runtime Environment (SRE) SRE is an open source runtime and SDK for production AI agents. It provides OS level abstractions for AI resources—LLMs…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or sre more popular?
Kestra has 30,141 GitHub stars and sre has 1,302. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and sre free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sre under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and sre?
Kestra is written in Java and sre 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 sre?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,141 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sre if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.