head to head · open source
Kestra vs rancher
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars, 3,495 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rancher has 26,031 stars, 3,225 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Kestra leads on adoption by 16% (30,122 vs 26,031 stars). Kestra is written in Java under Apache-2.0; rancher is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Kestra has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, rancher 12%. Kestra 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
| Kestra | rancher | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 26K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 3.2K |
| 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 rancher if
- You want the rancher 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 rancher 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 rancher
Rancher Rancher is an open source container management platform built for organizations that deploy containers in production. Rancher makes it easy to run Kubernetes everywhere, meet IT requirements, and empower DevOps teams. Stable Release v2.15.1 rancher/rancher:v2.15.1 / rancher/rancher:stable Read the full release notes. To get automated notifications of our latest release, you can watch the announcements category in our forums, or subscribe to the RSS feed Quick Start sudo docker run d restart=unless stopped p 80:80 p 443:443 privileged rancher/rancher Open your browser to Installation See…
read the full rancher overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kestra or rancher more popular?
Kestra has 30,122 GitHub stars and rancher has 26,031. Kestra has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kestra and rancher free?
Both are open source. Kestra is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rancher under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Kestra and rancher?
Kestra is written in Java and rancher 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 rancher?
Choose Kestra if you want the larger community (30,122 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rancher if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.