dagu

dagu runs scheduled jobs and multi-step workflows from a single binary, with no database or message broker required. You define what runs in plain YAML: shell scripts, Docker containers, Kubernetes jobs, SSH commands, HTTP calls, and coding-agent CLIs like Claude Code or Codex as steps. It ships a web UI for watching runs and digging into logs, and the core is free under GPLv3. It is cron that grew up, with a dashboard and retry logic.

Self-hosting is about as light as orchestration gets. Drop the binary on a Linux, macOS or Windows server, point it at a directory of YAML files, and you have a scheduler. State lives in files, so there is no Postgres or Redis to babysit. Workers can be long-lived machines or temporary Cloud Run and Kubernetes jobs, and a single instance handles real work for most teams.

Solo developers and small teams replacing a pile of crontab entries will love this, and the free Community edition covers the job running. Its limits are team features: two API keys, no user management, no SSO, RBAC or audit logs. A self-host license adds those at $50/mo for three servers or $150/mo for fifteen, workers unlimited. There is no hosted version anymore. That is the fair kind of paywall.

The catch is that YAML workflows get unwieldy fast. Simple pipelines stay readable, but complex branching logic starts to fight you. If your orchestration needs are heavy, look at Temporal or Airflow before you outgrow this.