head to head · open source
xxl-job vs ergo
xxl-job has 30,562 GitHub stars, 11,486 forks, 79 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. ergo has 4,660 stars, 191 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. xxl-job leads on adoption by 556% (30,562 vs 4,660 stars). xxl-job is written in Java under GPL-3.0; ergo is written in Go under MIT. xxl-job has attracted 38% as many forks as stars, ergo 4%. ergo was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (distributed), 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
| xxl-job | ergo | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-07-21 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 191 |
| 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 ergo if
- You want the ergo feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ergo 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 ergo
Ergo is an actor based framework for Go that brings network transparency to event driven architecture, drawing direct inspiration from Erlang/OTP. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is distributed as a pure Go library with zero external dependencies. The framework models every unit of work as an isolated process that communicates only through messages, so shared state, mutexes, and race conditions are eliminated by design rather than managed by convention.
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Frequently asked questions
Is xxl-job or ergo more popular?
xxl-job has 30,562 GitHub stars and ergo has 4,660. xxl-job has the larger community by that measure.
Are xxl-job and ergo free?
Both are open source. xxl-job is licensed under GPL-3.0 and ergo under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between xxl-job and ergo?
xxl-job is written in Java and ergo 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 ergo?
Choose xxl-job if you want the larger community (30,562 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose ergo if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.