head to head · open source
workflow-core vs tork
workflow-core has 5,926 GitHub stars, 1,262 forks, 133 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. tork has 817 stars, 63 forks, 20 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. workflow-core leads on adoption by 625% (5,926 vs 817 stars). workflow-core is written in C# under MIT; tork is written in Go under MIT. workflow-core has attracted 21% as many forks as stars, tork 8%. workflow-core 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| workflow-core | tork | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 5.9K | ★ 817 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | C# | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-07-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 63 |
| 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 tork if
- You want the tork feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tork 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 tork
Tork is a lightweight, distributed workflow engine written in Go and released under the MIT license. It runs each task of a job as a script inside its own container, so work is defined in YAML rather than as compiled code. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and uses Docker, Podman, or a plain shell as its task runtime, with PostgreSQL as the datastore and a message broker such as RabbitMQ for distributed operation.
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Orchestration & Scheduling projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Orchestration & Scheduling field.
Frequently asked questions
Is workflow-core or tork more popular?
workflow-core has 5,926 GitHub stars and tork has 817. workflow-core has the larger community by that measure.
Are workflow-core and tork free?
Both are open source. workflow-core is licensed under MIT and tork under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between workflow-core and tork?
workflow-core is written in C# and tork 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 tork?
Choose workflow-core if you want the larger community (5,926 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose tork if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.