Open-source Workflow Automation tools

The best open-source Workflow Automation tools, curated: 26 in the registry, including Crew, Apache Airflow, AppFlowy. Every tool is open-source; each entry lists license, self-hostability, and links.

26 tools · ← all categories · JSON

• Crew — tool, 2026-09-07
  Open-source coordination layer that lets parallel coding-agent sessions (Claude Code, Codex, opencode) share live context, exchange messages and split work without branching.
• Apache Airflow — tool, 2026-09-03
  Industry-standard DAG scheduler
• AppFlowy — tool, 2026-09-03
  OSS alt to Notion; ~75102 stars; AGPL copyleft; via ossinsight.io
• cua (Computer-Use Agents) — tool, 2026-09-03
  OSS alt to proprietary computer-use sandboxes; ~21100 stars; complements macOS-use (XREF), self-operating-computer, Open Interpreter; MIT. NOT the same as XREF macOS-use: this is the broader trycua/cua project (Computer/Lume/Lumier + cross-OS agent fleets & benchmarks) with sandboxed VMs. Sandboxing is the intended safety boundary for computer-use. No per-platform ToS flag.
• dkron — tool, 2026-09-03
  Distributed cron; cadence cooled
• Flowable — tool, 2026-09-03
  BPMN+CMMN+DMN; JVM
• Hatchet — tool, 2026-09-03
  Lightweight Postgres-only durable orchestration
• Huly — tool, 2026-09-03
  OSS alt to Linear/Jira/Slack; ~27264 stars; via ossinsight.io
• jBPM/Apache KIE — tool, 2026-09-03
  Oldest lineage + Drools; ASF incubating. Camunda8 core=SA; Camunda7 EoL
• laravel-process-approval — tool, 2026-09-03
  Most-starred approval component; library
• Lowcoder — tool, 2026-09-03
  Retool-clone successor; NocoDB reclassified SA
• Open Interpreter — tool, 2026-09-03
  OSS alt to ChatGPT Code Interpreter (local); ~67900 stars; complements cua, self-operating-computer, PyAutoGUI; Apache-2.0. LLM writes+runs code locally to operate the machine (incl. computer-use / OS control). Executes arbitrary code -> sandbox or require confirmation; not a per-platform ToS risk but a local-security risk.
• OpenRPA — tool, 2026-09-03
  Most complete OSI RPA; Windows-only; opt-out telemetry
• Pneumatic Workflow — tool, 2026-09-03
  Closest standalone approval app
• Robot Framework — tool, 2026-09-03
  OSS alt to UiPath Studio, Blue Prism; ~11800 stars; complements rpaframework (Robocorp), TagUI, Selenium/Playwright; Apache-2.0. Mature de-facto OSS RPA/test framework; deterministic keyword-driven (not LLM). No auth model of its own; inherits credentials of the libraries it drives. No per-platform ToS flag.
• rpaframework (Robocorp) — tool, 2026-09-03
  OSS alt to UiPath, Automation Anywhere activity packs; ~1500 stars; complements Robot Framework, TagUI; Apache-2.0. Battery of RPA libraries (Browser, Excel, PDF, Email, Windows, cloud) for Robot Framework + plain Python. Deterministic. Credentials handled by each library; no per-platform ToS flag.
• Skyvern — tool, 2026-09-03
  OSS alt to UiPath, Automation Anywhere (AI RPA); ~22700 stars; complements browser-use (XREF), LaVague, Stagehand, Notte; Drives a real browser via LLM+CV; AGPL copyleft (self-host obligations). No reverse-eng of any single platform, so no per-platform ToS flag, but automating logged-in sessions can still trip site anti-bot; use provided credentials/OAuth. Cloud offering is separate.
• Stagehand — tool, 2026-09-03
  OSS alt to proprietary AI browser-automation SaaS; ~23800 stars; complements Playwright, browser-use (XREF), Skyvern, Notte; MIT permissive. Layers deterministic Playwright with LLM act/extract, so it degrades to code-defined selectors (more reliable than pure-LLM). Generic driver; automating logged-in sites still subject to that site's anti-bot rules.
• taskt — tool, 2026-09-03
  Cleanest license; slowing
• Temporal — tool, 2026-09-03
  Industry-standard durable execution; heavy ops
• Wexflow — tool, 2026-09-03
  C# engine; approval first-class; single-maintainer
• workflow-use — tool, 2026-09-03
  'RPA 2.0' — record + replay deterministic browser workflows on top of browser-use; ~4k stars; AGPL network-copyleft (SaaS caution)
• Dagychu — tool, 2026-09-02
  Self-hosted orchestration platform for production jobs and pipelines — define repeatable workflows and run them on your own infrastructure (n8n-class). Feeds the "orchestrate" terminal stage of a scrape → enrich → outreach → analytics spine.
• UI-TARS Desktop / Agent TARS — tool, 2026-09-02
  An open multimodal GUI-automation agent stack that controls a computer via a vision-language model — clicking, typing, and reading the screen locally — with a CLI and Web UI, browser control, and MCP-tool integration. From ByteDance.
• daily-briefing — tool, 2026-08-29
  Open-source AI news-briefing agent that runs entirely on GitHub Actions with no server: Groq for the model + Tavily for web search + email delivery. A reference pattern for owned, near-zero-cost GTM automation.
• Activepieces — tool, 2026-08-25
  Open-source workflow automation (Zapier alternative): no-code builder, 280+ integrations, a TypeScript pieces framework, and ~400 MCP servers for LLM integration. Self-hostable.