head to head · open source
Kestra vs Trigger
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Trigger has 16,699 stars, 1,523 forks, 342 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 80% (30,122 vs 16,699 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; Trigger is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, Trigger 9%. Kestra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai-agents, 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 | Trigger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 Trigger if
- You want the Trigger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Trigger 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 Trigger
Build and deploy fully‑managed AI agents and workflows Website Docs Issues Example projects Feature requests Public roadmap Self hosting About Trigger.dev Trigger.dev is the open source platform for building AI workflows in TypeScript. Long running tasks with retries, queues, observability, and elastic scaling. The platform designed for building AI agents Build AI agents using all the frameworks, services and LLMs you're used to, deploy them to Trigger.dev and get durable, long running tasks with retries, queues, observability, and elastic scaling out of the box. Long running without timeouts : Execute your…
read the full Trigger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or Trigger more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and Trigger has 16,699. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and Trigger free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Trigger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and Trigger?
Kestra is written in Java and Trigger 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 Trigger?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Trigger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.