head to head · open source
Kestra vs uncloud
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. uncloud has 5,590 stars, 184 forks, 89 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 439% (30,122 vs 5,590 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; uncloud is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, uncloud 3%. Kestra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (devops), 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 | uncloud | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 5.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 184 |
| 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 uncloud if
- You want the uncloud 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 uncloud 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 uncloud
▸ Deploy and scale containerised apps across servers without Swarm or Kubernetes overhead ◂ Uncloud is a lightweight clustering and container orchestration tool that lets you deploy and manage web apps across cloud VMs and bare metal with minimised cluster management overhead. It creates a secure WireGuard mesh network between your Docker hosts and provides automatic service discovery, load balancing, ingress with HTTPS, and simple CLI commands to manage your apps. Unlike traditional orchestrators, there's no central control plane and quorum to maintain. Each machine maintains a synchronised copy of the cluster…
read the full uncloud overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or uncloud more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and uncloud has 5,590. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and uncloud free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and uncloud under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and uncloud?
Kestra is written in Java and uncloud 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 uncloud?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose uncloud if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.