head to head · open source
Kestra vs workflow-core
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. workflow-core has 5,939 stars, 1,261 forks, 133 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Kestra leads on adoption by 407% (30,122 vs 5,939 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; workflow-core is written in C# under MIT. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, workflow-core 21%. Kestra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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 | workflow-core | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 workflow-core if
- You want the workflow-core feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and workflow-core 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 workflow-core
Workflow Core Workflow Core is a light weight embeddable workflow engine targeting .NET Standard. Think: long running processes with multiple tasks that need to track state. It supports pluggable persistence and concurrency providers to allow for multi node clusters. Announcements New related project: Conductor Conductor is a stand alone workflow server as opposed to a library that uses Workflow Core internally. It exposes an API that allows you to store workflow definitions, track running workflows, manage events and define custom steps and scripts for usage in your workflows. Documentation See Tutorial here…
read the full workflow-core overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or workflow-core more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and workflow-core has 5,939. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and workflow-core free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and workflow-core under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and workflow-core?
Kestra is written in Java and workflow-core in C#. 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 workflow-core?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose workflow-core if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.