Conductor vs Google Cloud Workflows
Conductor
conductor-oss.org
Google Cloud Workflows
cloud.google.comSide by side
| Figure | Conductor | Google Cloud Workflows |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.01/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 2 | 6 |
| Spec score · Process Orchestration Software | 7.8 (#15) | 8.8 (#6) |
| Spec score · IT Orchestration Software | 7.8 (#14) | 8.8 (#2) |
| Spec score · Workflow Orchestration Software | 7.7 (#27) | 8.8 (#7) |
| Integrations | The integration guide describes event-driven orchestration, MCP tool integration, and Agent2Agent integration with independently deployed agents. | Connectors integrate workflows with Google Cloud APIs and handle request formatting, retries, and long-running operations; examples include Pub/Sub, Firestore, and Secret Manager. |
| Support | The project directs users to its public Slack community to ask questions and share resources. | Google Cloud customers, including free trial customers, receive Basic Support with documentation, community forums, billing assistance, and Active Assist. |
| What it does | Conductor is an open-source platform for building and orchestrating AI agents and workflows on a durable execution engine. | Google Cloud Workflows orchestrates Google Cloud services, custom Cloud Run services or functions, and HTTP APIs into serverless applications and pipelines without infrastructure management. |
Plans
Google Cloud Workflows
- Always FreeFree
- Always Free external stepsFree
- Always Free internal stepsFree
- Internal steps$0.01 a month
- Pay as you go$0.01 a month
- External steps$0.03 a month
In their own words
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.
Google Cloud Workflows
Google Cloud Workflows is a managed orchestration platform for running Google Cloud services, custom services, and HTTP APIs in a chosen sequence. Workflow definitions use YAML or JSON and can combine ordered steps with conditions, loops, parallel work, and reusable subworkflows. Start an execution manually, through client libraries or REST, or on a schedule with Cloud Scheduler. Connectors link workflows to Google Cloud APIs such as Pub/Sub, Firestore, and Secret Manager, while workflow steps can also call custom or private HTTP and HTTPS endpoints. Reliability features include retries, polling, error handling, callbacks, and waits of up to one year. A single execution can run up to 100,000 steps and last no more than one year. IAM controls access; Secret Manager can store and retrieve secrets. Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring surface execution logs, volume, errors, and duration. Pricing is based on executed steps, including failed and retried steps, while idle workflows incur no charges. The free plan includes 5,000 internal and 2,000 external steps; paid usage starts at $0.01 per month, with rates that vary by step type and volume.