Kestra vs Windmill — Comparison

Kestra

Use declarative language to build simpler, faster, scalable and flexible workflows

Kestra is the open-source orchestration platform for data, AI, and infrastructure workflows. Event-driven, language-agnostic, and built for enterprise scale. Kestra scales because it is designed for cross-team orchestration from day one. Standardize Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD and operational workflows across hybrid and air-gapped environments. Run ingestion, transformations, dbt, Airbyte, Spark and quality checks in one workflow engine. Agents, RAG pipelines, evaluation, publishing, retraining all orchestrated with governance and observability. Write workflows in YAML. Version them. Review them. Ship them. Cloud, data, infra, CI/CD, ITSM, messaging. Plug into your entire stack. Cron, events, webhooks, messages. One engine to run them all. Retries, timeouts, SLAs, RBAC, audit logs. SOC 2, Built to run in production. Run tasks in Python, Bash, Node.js, Go, or containers. No refactoring required. Empower every team members to collaborate from a single tool—code for developers, UI for everyone else, all in sync. Copilot for speed, agents for action. Create, iterate, and automate workflows with an AI native platform. Trigger executions, manage workflows and resources through the API, and roll out updates safely with Git-driven CI/CD pipelines. Self-host on Docker or Kubernetes. Free Forever Built for critical environments. SSO, RBAC, audit logs, multi-tenancy. Isolated workers and dedicated task runners. Hybrid environments: Cloud, On-Prem, Air-Gapped. SLA-backed support and a dedicated customer success program. Managed platform, production-ready, scalable. Fastest time to value. Jump-start your workflows with a growing library of workflow templates Operate, govern, and scale workflows across your entire organization Declarative, event-driven platform built to run in production from day one. Start small, scale instantly, pay only for what you use. Get direct help from the Kestra team. Upgrade for faster SLAs, a dedicated channel, and hands-on guidance from the engineers behind the platform. Execute all your workflows as code or from the UI Visualize the relationship dependencies between your flows Wait for specific conditions to be met before proceeding Pause and resume workflow executions with custom inputs The Scheduler is a server component responsible for processing all triggers Execute your workflow based on events Millisecond-latency event processing for business-critical workflows Define service level agreements for workflow execution Built-in code editor to write and run your workflows Trigger autocompletion to list available tasks or properties of a given task Advanced Git integration to sync all your Kestra objects incl. flows, apps, unit tests, dashboards and namespace files Visualize the structure of your flow Instal

Windmill

Trusted by 4,000+ organizations, including 300+ EE customers at scale:

Build mission-critical internal tools and data pipelines that integrate directly with your existing stack and resources. Use Windmill's WebIDE or work locally with your favorite editor, CLI and AI agent. Write scripts in 20+ languages (Python, TS, Go...) with full LSP support, auto-generated UI, managed dependencies and turn them into instant endpoints or hooks for pubsub events. Orchestrate your scripts into high-performance flows with full code flexibility, AI assistance, and sub-20ms overhead. Build powerful full-stack apps using Windmill as a backend and any framework as frontend. Git-based collaboration, auto-scaling infrastructure, and full observability. No DevOps glue required. We engineered Windmill to be the fastest orchestrator in the industry, ensuring your most demanding workloads never bottleneck. From a single-node VPS to 1,000-node K8s clusters, auto-scale on demand or isolate critical tasks with dedicated worker groups on Kubernetes and Docker. Open source and self-hostable. Your code, your data, your infrastructure. Normal code in mainstream languages, no custom or proprietary SDKs. Run it locally, generate it with LLMs, port it anytime. Focus on what matters: your business logic. Every possible integration and trigger with external systems is already built-in with enterprise-grade reliability. PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Kafka, and 100+ more. Granular RBAC, SSO, Secret Management, and comprehensive Audit Logs. Battle-tested reliability at scale in regulated industries with air-gapped support. We actually use Windmill's job engine to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. We schedule future jobs into Windmill's job engine to handle some drip hydration tasks for our demo platform. We can build things very quickly in Windmill, iterate very quickly, and we can ship them into a nice front end portal. Windmill quickly became crucial at Photoroom. We self-hosted Windmill Enterprise Edition to run a large number of internal scripts and business-critical automations. Windmill made chatops and iterations over scripts incredibly easy. It proved very reliable for running and monitoring workloads at scale. On top of that, their support is incredibly fast. At Pave, we self-host Windmill Enterprise Edition to run 100+ scripts and 15+ crons. Our Windmill deployment interacts with half a dozen data stores to power all kinds of business-critical tasks and automations across several teams. It enables our engineering org to move quickly while keeping things secure and avoiding infrastructure sprawl. Our platform per se is built entirely upon Windmill. It was one of the few products that allowed us the flexibility of integrating with our own third-party Python library and having a graphical user interface already pre-baked - that was the main selling point of Windmill for us. Today, Windmill ranks among the most stable components of our infrastructure. At Investing.com, we use Windmill to orchestrate our AI workflows. The quick setup th

Kestra

Windmill

Kestra

Windmill

Kestra

Windmill