head to head · open source
ProxmoxVE vs cadence
ProxmoxVE has 29,607 GitHub stars, 2,887 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cadence has 9,444 stars, 913 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. ProxmoxVE leads on adoption by 214% (29,607 vs 9,444 stars). ProxmoxVE is written in Shell under MIT; cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0. ProxmoxVE has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, cadence 10%. ProxmoxVE 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
| ProxmoxVE | cadence | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Shell | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 913 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ProxmoxVE if
- You weight community size — 30K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cadence if
- You want the cadence 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 cadence fits your workflow better
About ProxmoxVE
Proxmox VE Helper Scripts (Community Edition) is a collection of Shell scripts that install and configure self hosted services as containers or virtual machines on Proxmox VE. It is a community project built on the foundation of @tteck's original work, distributed under the MIT license, and it lives in the Proxmox VE and homelab ecosystem alongside LXC, Docker, Debian, Ubuntu, and Alpine tooling. The scripts cover hundreds of services across home automation, media, networking, monitoring, databases, security, and developer tooling.
read the full ProxmoxVE overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is ProxmoxVE or cadence more popular?
ProxmoxVE has 29,607 GitHub stars and cadence has 9,444. ProxmoxVE has the larger community by that measure.
Are ProxmoxVE and cadence free?
Both are open source. ProxmoxVE is licensed under MIT and cadence under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ProxmoxVE and cadence?
ProxmoxVE is written in Shell and cadence 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, ProxmoxVE or cadence?
Choose ProxmoxVE if you want the larger community (29,607 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cadence if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.