A Curated List of Open-Source Workflow Engines

Complete Products

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

Argo – Open‑source container‑native workflow engine for Kubernetes.

Azkaban – Batch workflow scheduler originally built at LinkedIn for Hadoop jobs.

Brigade – Tool for running scripts and automating tasks in the cloud as part of a Kubernetes cluster.

Cadence – Uber‑engineered orchestration engine for long‑running asynchronous business logic.

CloudSlang – Workflow engine that automates DevOps use cases.

Conductor – Netflix’s cloud‑native orchestration engine.

Copper – High‑performance Java workflow engine.

Cromwell – Scala‑written engine that executes workflows defined in WDL or CWL.

Cylc – Engine for orchestrating complex distributed workflows, originally designed for weather forecasting.

Digdag – Simple tool for building, running, scheduling, and monitoring complex task pipelines.

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

Flor – Ruby‑based workflow engine.

Imixs‑Workflow – BPMN 2.0‑compliant, human‑centric workflow engine.

Kiba – Ruby data‑processing and ETL framework.

Mistral – OpenStack‑based workflow service.

Oozie – Hadoop workflow scheduler.

Pegasus – Automates, recovers, and debugs scientific computations.

Pinball – Scalable workflow manager used at Pinterest.

Piper – Simple, distributed Java workflow engine.

RunDeck – Job scheduler and automation tool.

Titanoboa – Platform for building complex workflows on the JVM.

Wexflow – High‑performance, scalable, modular, cross‑platform engine.

Workflow Core – Lightweight .NET Standard workflow engine.

Workflow Engine – Lightweight .NET and Java workflow engine.

Zeebe – Microservice‑oriented workflow engine that executes BPMN models from the Camunda team.

BPM Suites

Activiti – Lightweight Java‑centric BPMN engine for real‑world process automation.

Activiti Cloud – Cloud‑native business‑automation platform for distributed environments.

Flowable – Compact, efficient open‑source BPM engine providing workflow and BPM platforms.

jBPM – Extensible Java workflow engine supporting the latest BPMN 2.0 specification.

SaaS Solutions

Bip.io – Network automation for humans and bots.

Zenaton – Workflow engine offering data processing and background jobs for PHP, Node.js, Python, and Ruby.

Embedded Libraries

Camunda – Mature Java library and full‑featured product.

Captain – Distributed lightweight Java workflow engine for microservice architectures.

Luigi – Python module for building complex batch‑processing pipelines.

Viewflow – Reusable workflow library for Django applications.

Workflow Core – Lightweight .NET Standard workflow engine.

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

Source: http://jiagoushi.pro/curated-list-awesome-open-source-workflow-engines