head to head · open source
xxl-job vs Hatchet
xxl-job has 30,562 GitHub stars, 11,486 forks, 79 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Hatchet has 7,957 stars, 504 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. xxl-job leads on adoption by 284% (30,562 vs 7,957 stars). xxl-job is written in Java under GPL-3.0; Hatchet is written in Go under MIT. xxl-job has attracted 38% as many forks as stars, Hatchet 6%. Hatchet 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 | Hatchet | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 8.0K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-07-21 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 504 |
| 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 Hatchet if
- You want the Hatchet feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Hatchet 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 Hatchet
Hatchet is an MIT licensed, Go based orchestration engine for background tasks, AI agents, and durable workflows, built for teams that need reliable queueing, retries, and observability while writing workers in Python, TypeScript, Go, or Ruby.
read the full Hatchet overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is xxl-job or Hatchet more popular?
xxl-job has 30,562 GitHub stars and Hatchet has 7,957. xxl-job has the larger community by that measure.
Are xxl-job and Hatchet free?
Both are open source. xxl-job is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Hatchet under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between xxl-job and Hatchet?
xxl-job is written in Java and Hatchet 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 Hatchet?
Choose xxl-job if you want the larger community (30,562 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Hatchet if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.