head to head · open source
cadence vs open-claude-cowork
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars, 915 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. open-claude-cowork has 4,359 stars, 735 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. cadence leads on adoption by 117% (9,446 vs 4,359 stars). cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0; open-claude-cowork is written in JavaScript under MIT. cadence has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, open-claude-cowork 17%. cadence was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (workflow-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
| cadence | open-claude-cowork | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.4K | ★ 4.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-05-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 915 | ⑂ 735 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cadence if
- You weight community size — 9.4K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick open-claude-cowork if
- You want the open-claude-cowork feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and open-claude-cowork fits your workflow better
About cadence
Cadence is an open source orchestration engine for running asynchronous, long running business logic in a fault tolerant way. Written in Go under the Apache 2.0 license, it lives in the distributed systems and workflow automation space, and the project has been open source since 2017. This repository holds the core engine plus supporting tools: the CLI, schema management, a benchmark suite, and a canary. Client libraries for Go and Java are official, while Python and Ruby SDKs come from the community, and iWF can be layered on top as a DSL framework.
read the full cadence overview →
About open-claude-cowork
Open Claude Cowork is an open source JavaScript desktop chat application in the Electron, Node.js, and Anthropic Claude ecosystem. It uses the Claude Agent SDK, Composio Tool Router, and MCP, and includes Secure Clawdbot for messaging platforms.
read the full open-claude-cowork overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cadence or open-claude-cowork more popular?
cadence has 9,446 GitHub stars and open-claude-cowork has 4,359. cadence has the larger community by that measure.
Are cadence and open-claude-cowork free?
Both are open source. cadence is licensed under Apache-2.0 and open-claude-cowork under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cadence and open-claude-cowork?
cadence is written in Go and open-claude-cowork in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, cadence or open-claude-cowork?
Choose cadence if you want the larger community (9,446 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose open-claude-cowork if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.