kestra
by kestra-io
Kestra is an open-source platform for building and running automated workflows, written as simple YAML files or built in a visual editor. It handles scheduled and event-driven jobs such as data pipelines, infrastructure tasks, business processes and AI agent flows.
- Stars
- 30.1k +14 a day
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- Runs on
- A small server
- Setup
- Moderate
- Language
- Java
- Age
- 2623 days
What you can do with it
- Schedule data pipelines that pull from databases, APIs or cloud storage and run scripts in any language
- Trigger automated workflows from events, with retries, error handling and Git-versioned definitions
- Build AI agent and retrieval workflows, and expose flows as tools to AI assistants through its MCP server
Could replace
- Make
Our suggestion based on what it does, not a feature-by-feature comparison.
Make money with it
A freelancer could offer workflow automation and data pipeline setup to small businesses, using Kestra as the self-hosted engine.
An idea, not financial advice. Check the licence before charging for anything built on it.
Ways a business could use it
- Automate recurring reporting, data syncing and back-office tasks in place of paid automation subscriptions
- Run scheduled jobs and monitoring across several systems from one place, with failures and retries tracked
Can you use it commercially?
Free to use, change and sell, including in paid products. Keep the copyright notice.
Not legal advice. Read the project's licence file before building a product on it.
Getting it running
It is a Java application normally run with Docker, and the README points to a quickstart guide to get going in a few minutes.
Follow the official instructions in the project README.
Things to check
- Some enterprise features may be limited to a paid edition
- Version 2.0 has breaking changes, so upgrades need care
- AI features need API keys for third-party model providers, which may cost money
Checked 29 Oct 2026. Summary drafted by AI from the project's README.
