head to head · open source
rancher vs workflow-core
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars, 3,225 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. workflow-core has 5,939 stars, 1,261 forks, 133 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. rancher leads on adoption by 338% (26,031 vs 5,939 stars). rancher is written in Go under Apache-2.0; workflow-core is written in C# under MIT. rancher has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, workflow-core 21%. rancher 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
| rancher | workflow-core | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick rancher if
- You weight community size — 26K 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 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 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 →
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 rancher or workflow-core more popular?
rancher has 26,031 GitHub stars and workflow-core has 5,939. rancher has the larger community by that measure.
Are rancher and workflow-core free?
Both are open source. rancher is licensed under Apache-2.0 and workflow-core under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rancher and workflow-core?
rancher is written in Go 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, rancher or workflow-core?
Choose rancher if you want the larger community (26,031 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.