A Curated List of Awesome Open‑Source Workflow Engines

Complete Products

Airflow – a Python‑based platform for running directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) as tasks.

Argo – an open‑source container‑native workflow engine for executing jobs on Kubernetes.

Azkaban – a batch workflow scheduler created at LinkedIn for running Hadoop jobs.

Brigade – a tool that runs scripts and automates tasks in the cloud as part of a Kubernetes cluster.

Cadence – an orchestration engine for asynchronous, long‑running business logic developed by Uber Engineering.

CloudSlang – a workflow engine that automates DevOps use cases.

Conductor – Netflix’s cloud‑native orchestration engine.

Copper – a high‑performance Java workflow engine.

Cromwell – a Scala‑written workflow engine designed for simplicity and scalability, executing workflows written in WDL or CWL.

Cylc – a workflow engine for orchestrating complex distributed workflows, originally built for NIWA’s weather‑forecast system.

Digdag – a simple tool that helps you build, run, schedule, and monitor complex task pipelines.

Fission Workflows – a high‑performance workflow engine for serverless functions on Kubernetes.

Flor – a Ruby‑based workflow engine.

Imixs‑Workflow – a powerful, human‑centric workflow engine based on the BPMN 2.0 standard.

Kiba – a Ruby data‑processing and ETL framework.

Mistral – a workflow service built on top of OpenStack.

Oozie – Hadoop’s workflow scheduler.

Pegasus – automates, recovers, and debugs scientific computing workflows.

Pinball – a scalable workflow manager used at Pinterest.

Piper – a distributed Java workflow engine designed to be extremely simple.

RunDeck – a job scheduler and run‑book automation tool.

Titanoboa – a platform for creating complex workflows on the JVM.

Wexflow – a high‑performance, scalable, modular, cross‑platform workflow engine.

Workflow Core – a lightweight workflow engine for the .NET standard.

Workflow Engine – a lightweight .NET and Java workflow engine.

Zeebe – a micro‑service orchestration engine that executes BPMN models developed by the Camunda team.

BPM Suites

Activiti – a leading lightweight, Java‑centric open‑source BPMN engine supporting real‑world process automation.

Activiti Cloud – the next‑generation business‑automation platform offering cloud‑native building blocks for distributed infrastructures.

Flowable – a compact, efficient open‑source business‑process engine providing BPM platforms for developers, administrators, and business users.

jBPM – a lightweight, extensible workflow engine written in pure Java that implements the latest BPMN 2.0 specification.

SAAS

Bip.io – network automation for humans and robots.

Zenaton – a workflow engine with data‑processing and background‑job support for PHP, Node.js, Python, and Ruby.

Embedded Libraries

Camunda – a Java library and fully‑featured product for workflow and decision automation.

Captain – a lightweight, distributed Java workflow engine for micro‑service architectures.

Luigi – a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs.

Viewflow – a reusable workflow library for organizing collaborative business logic in Django applications.

Workflow Core – a lightweight workflow engine for the .NET standard.

Architect’s Highlighted Picks (Bolded)

For business‑process approval, choose Flowable . For job orchestration, select Oozie or Airflow . For Hadoop jobs, use Oozie ; for other job types, consider Airflow . For micro‑service orchestration, pick Cadence or Zeebe . Which one will you choose?