head to head · open source
Kestra vs swarm-cronjob
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. swarm-cronjob has 889 stars, 77 forks, 40 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 3,288% (30,122 vs 889 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; swarm-cronjob is written in Go under MIT. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, swarm-cronjob 9%. 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 | swarm-cronjob | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 889 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 77 |
| 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 swarm-cronjob if
- You want the swarm-cronjob feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and swarm-cronjob 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 swarm-cronjob
About swarm cronjob lets you run recurring jobs on Docker Swarm by defining cron style schedules with service labels. It watches your services through the Docker API, keeps its configuration in sync automatically, and creates scheduled job runs across the cluster without requiring a separate scheduler. [!TIP] Want to be notified of new releases? Check out 🔔 Diun (Docker Image Update Notifier) project! Documentation Documentation can be found on Contributing Want to contribute? Awesome! The most basic way to show your support is to star the project, or to raise issues. You can also support this project by…
read the full swarm-cronjob overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or swarm-cronjob more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and swarm-cronjob has 889. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and swarm-cronjob free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and swarm-cronjob under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and swarm-cronjob?
Kestra is written in Java and swarm-cronjob 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 swarm-cronjob?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose swarm-cronjob if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.