head to head · open source
xxl-job vs earthly
xxl-job has 30,562 GitHub stars, 11,486 forks, 79 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. earthly has 12,047 stars, 457 forks, 744 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. xxl-job leads on adoption by 154% (30,562 vs 12,047 stars). xxl-job is written in Java under GPL-3.0; earthly is written in Go under MPL-2.0. xxl-job has attracted 38% as many forks as stars, earthly 4%. xxl-job 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
| xxl-job | earthly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 12K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-07-21 | 2025-10-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 457 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick xxl-job if
- You weight community size — 31K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick earthly if
- You want the earthly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and earthly fits your workflow better
About xxl-job
XXL JOB is a distributed task scheduling framework written in Java and released under the GPL 3.0 licence, built for teams that need scheduled jobs to run reliably across a cluster of machines rather than inside a single application process.
read the full xxl-job overview →
About earthly
Earthly is a container based build and CI/CD framework that runs every pipeline inside containers so the same build executes identically on a laptop, a colleague's machine, or any CI system, and it is built for engineers and platform teams who maintain build logic across monorepos or polyrepos and are comfortable with Dockerfile and Makefile style syntax.
read the full earthly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is xxl-job or earthly more popular?
xxl-job has 30,562 GitHub stars and earthly has 12,047. xxl-job has the larger community by that measure.
Are xxl-job and earthly free?
Both are open source. xxl-job is licensed under GPL-3.0 and earthly under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between xxl-job and earthly?
xxl-job is written in Java and earthly 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, xxl-job or earthly?
Choose xxl-job if you want the larger community (30,562 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose earthly if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.