Workflow Orchestration
1 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars — scroll down for our analysis.
| Tool | Stars | Velocity | Language | License | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Argo Workflows Kubernetes workflow engine | 16.6k | +32/wk | Go | Apache License 2.0 | 79 |
Our Analysis
If you run workloads on Kubernetes and need to orchestrate multi-step jobs — data pipelines, CI/CD, ML training, batch processing — Argo Workflows lets you define those pipelines as Kubernetes-native DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) in YAML. Each step in your workflow runs as a container on your cluster. You get parallelism, retries, conditionals, loops, and artifact passing between steps. The web UI shows you the DAG visually with real-time status. It's a CNCF graduated project, which means serious production adoption. 16.5k stars. Used by Intuit, Tesla, Google, and many others. Completely free. Apache 2.0 license. Akuity offers commercial support and Argo CD (related but separate) as a managed service, but Argo Workflows itself is free. Small teams already on Kubernetes who need workflow orchestration beyond simple CronJobs should look here. If you're NOT on Kubernetes, this isn't for you — the entire model assumes K8s. The catch: you need Kubernetes. That's a hard prerequisite. And YAML workflow definitions get painful fast for complex pipelines. The learning curve combines Kubernetes complexity with workflow engine complexity. Not for the faint of heart.