Cadence vs Conductor
Cadence
cadenceworkflow.io
Conductor
conductor-oss.orgSide by side
| Figure | Cadence | Conductor |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · Process Orchestration Software | 8.0 (#9) | 7.8 (#15) |
| Spec score · Workflow Orchestration Software | 8.0 (#15) | 7.7 (#27) |
| Deployment | Deployment options include embedded SQLite, Docker Compose, and Kubernetes with Helm; the page also lists a managed Uber cluster for Uber internal teams. | The project documents self-hosting with Docker and says Conductor runs anywhere Docker runs. |
| Languages | The project lists official SDKs for Go, Java, and Python, and a community Ruby client. | The project lists SDKs for Java, Python, TypeScript, .NET, Go, Ruby, and Rust. |
| Support | The project points users to Stack Overflow, CNCF Slack, GitHub Issues, and community contributors for support. | The project directs users to its public Slack community to ask questions and share resources. |
| What it does | Cadence is an open-source workflow engine for building fault-tolerant, stateful distributed applications. | Conductor is an open-source platform for building and orchestrating AI agents and workflows on a durable execution engine. |
Plans
In their own words
Cadence
Cadence has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Conductor
Conductor is an Apache 2.0 open-source platform for building and orchestrating AI agents and workflows on a durable execution engine. It persists workflow and task state, allowing recovery after worker or infrastructure failure, with retries, timeouts, pause, resume, and termination controls. Workflows can use nested loops, dynamic branches, sub-workflows, and thousands of tasks. Native AI features include LLM tasks, MCP tool discovery and calls, human approval steps, and vector workflows for retrieval-augmented generation. Agents from LangGraph, CrewAI, Google ADK, and the OpenAI SDK can be used. SDKs are listed for Java, Python, TypeScript, .NET, Go, Ruby, and Rust. Conductor documents event-driven and Agent2Agent integrations. It can run anywhere Docker runs, using Redis by default and Elasticsearch for indexing, with replaceable storage and queue backends. Plans include free self-hosted OSS and hosted Developer Edition options.