Scheduling

xxl-job30.1k★

Xxl-job handles that. It's essentially a centralized cron server with a web UI: you register your jobs, set schedules, and the platform distributes execution across your executor nodes. GPL-3.0 licensed. The admin panel shows job status, execution logs, running tasks, and lets you trigger, pause, or kill jobs manually. Supports CRON triggers, fixed-rate triggers, and API triggers. Built-in retry, timeout, failover, and sharding strategies. Fully free. No paid tier. This is a Chinese open source project (documentation is primarily in Chinese) widely used in Chinese tech companies. The catch: GPL-3.0 means derivative works must also be GPL. Check if that's compatible with your project. Documentation and community are primarily Chinese-language. If you don't read Chinese, you'll rely on machine translation and English blog posts. The architecture requires a separate admin server (MySQL-backed) alongside your executor nodes, which adds operational complexity.

Temporal20.1k★

Temporal is a durable execution platform for workflows that can't just crash and lose state: payment processing, order fulfillment, long-running agent tasks. Write your business logic as code, and Temporal guarantees it runs to completion even if servers crash, networks fail, or deployments happen mid-workflow. What's free: The Temporal server is fully open source. MIT license. All core features are free: workflow execution, activity retries, timers, signals, queries, search, visibility. Temporal's mental model is the big win: write normal-looking code (Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, .NET) and Temporal handles retries, timeouts, crash recovery, and state persistence automatically. No message queues to manage. No dead letter queues to monitor. Your workflow function just runs, no matter what. The catch: operating the Temporal server is non-trivial. It needs Cassandra or PostgreSQL + Elasticsearch for visibility. A production cluster is 3+ nodes with careful resource planning. The programming model also requires understanding of deterministic constraints. Your workflow code can't use random numbers, current time, or non-deterministic operations, which trips up developers initially.

Dagster15.5k★

Instead of defining tasks and dependencies, you define data assets (the things your pipelines produce) and Dagster figures out what needs to run and when. What's free: The open source orchestrator is fully free. Apache 2.0 license. All core features included: asset definitions, scheduling, sensors, partitions, IO managers. The asset-based approach is Dagster's real innovation. Instead of thinking 'run task A then task B,' you think 'I need this dataset to be fresh.' Dagster handles the rest. The local development experience is excellent. Run `dagster dev` and you get a full UI instantly. Testing data pipelines is actually pleasant, which is rare. The catch: Dagster Cloud is where they make money, and some features nudge you toward it. The open source version requires you to manage your own deployment (Kubernetes, Docker, or a daemon). The community is smaller than Airflow's, so you'll find fewer Stack Overflow answers. And if your team already knows Airflow, the mental model shift to asset-based thinking takes real effort.

dolphinscheduler14.3k★

DolphinScheduler handles that. Basically, it's a visual workflow scheduler where you drag and drop tasks into a pipeline and it manages dependencies, retries, and scheduling. It is an Apache project backed by a real community. Supports tasks in Python, Shell, SQL, Spark, Flink, and more. The visual DAG editor makes it accessible to people who are not writing code for a living. The catch: it is Java-based and the self-hosted setup is not trivial; you need ZooKeeper and a database. The UI is functional but dated compared to newer tools like Dagster or Prefect. And the documentation has rough patches, especially for non-Chinese-speaking users (the project originated in China).

croner2.6k★

Croner is a tiny cron expression parser and scheduler for JavaScript and TypeScript. No external dependencies, no system cron, no database. It runs in your Node.js process, Deno, Bun, or even the browser. TypeScript, MIT. The selling point is zero dependencies and correctness. It handles standard cron syntax plus extensions like seconds-level precision and the `L` flag (last day of month). It's timezone-aware out of the box, which is the thing that trips up most cron libraries. Fully free. No paid tier, no cloud service. It's a library. You npm install it and call it from your code. Solo to large teams: free. The library weighs almost nothing and does exactly one thing well. The catch: croner runs inside your process. If your app crashes, your schedules stop. For production workloads that absolutely cannot miss a scheduled run, you need a proper job queue with persistence (BullMQ with Redis, or a system-level cron job. Croner is perfect for in-process scheduling where a missed run isn't catastrophic. It's not a replacement for distributed job infrastructure.

go-quartz2.0k★

Go-quartz is a lightweight in-process job scheduler. Basically, it's cron but embedded directly in your Go app, no external dependencies needed. It supports cron expressions, fixed-interval scheduling, and one-off delayed jobs. Jobs run in goroutines, so they're concurrent by default. The API is clean: create a scheduler, define a job, set a trigger, start. That's it. It's fully free under MIT. No paid tier, no cloud version, no strings. It's a library you import and use. go-quartz is the right choice when your scheduling needs are simple and you don't need durability. Once you need jobs to survive restarts or run across multiple instances, you've outgrown it. The catch: it's in-process only. If your app restarts, all scheduled state is lost; there's no persistence layer. For durable job scheduling where jobs survive restarts and can be distributed across multiple instances, you need something heavier. Temporal handles complex workflow orchestration. For simpler persistent job queues, look at something like River (for Postgres-backed Go jobs) or Asynq (Redis-backed).

gocron539★

Gocron is a lightweight cron job runner written in Go that gives you a web UI to manage it all. Instead of editing crontab files on a server and hoping you got the syntax right, you get a dashboard where you can create, pause, and monitor scheduled jobs. It's small, fast, and self-hosted only. MIT licensed. This is a focused tool, not a platform. You define jobs (shell commands or HTTP calls), set the schedule, and gocron handles execution and logging. The web UI shows run history and status at a glance. Everything is free. No paid tier, no cloud offering. You run it in Docker or as a binary. The catch: this is nascent, and a 2. The community is tiny, so if you hit a bug you're largely on your own. For serious production scheduling with retries, dependencies, and alerting, you want something heavier. But for a homelab or small server where you just need cron with a UI, gocron nails it.