head to head · open source
workflow-core vs Inngest
workflow-core has 5,926 GitHub stars, 1,262 forks, 133 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Inngest has 5,853 stars, 358 forks, 234 open issues and last shipped yesterday. workflow-core leads on adoption by 1% (5,926 vs 5,853 stars). workflow-core is written in C# under MIT; Inngest is written in Go under a custom or non-standard licence. workflow-core has attracted 21% as many forks as stars, Inngest 6%. Inngest was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (workflow-engine), 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
| workflow-core | Inngest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 5.9K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | MIT | Custom / other |
| Written in | C# | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 358 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick workflow-core if
- You weight community size — 5.9K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Inngest if
- You want the Inngest feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Inngest fits your workflow better
About workflow-core
Workflow Core is a lightweight, embeddable workflow engine targeting .NET Standard, written in C and released under the MIT license. It lives in the .NET ecosystem, distributed as NuGet packages, and is built around the idea of long running processes that contain multiple tasks and must track their state between steps. Rather than running as a separate server, it is a library that is hosted inside an application, and it exposes a fluent C API for defining workflows. Workflows are expressed as a starting step followed by chained steps, and the same class can declare inputs and outputs that move data from one step …
read the full workflow-core overview →
About Inngest
Inngest is an open source workflow orchestration platform that lets developers write durable, event driven step functions in their existing language SDKs and run them on serverless, long running servers, or the edge.
read the full Inngest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is workflow-core or Inngest more popular?
workflow-core has 5,926 GitHub stars and Inngest has 5,853. workflow-core has the larger community by that measure.
Are workflow-core and Inngest free?
Both are open source. workflow-core is licensed under MIT, and Inngest has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between workflow-core and Inngest?
workflow-core is written in C# and Inngest 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, workflow-core or Inngest?
Choose workflow-core if you want the larger community (5,926 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Inngest if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.