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windmill-labs
windmill
Rust2022–2026
windmill-labs / windmill

windmill

Code-first platform for workflows, apps and AI agents, on the fastest self-hostable orchestrator (benchmarked against Airflow, Prefect and Temporal). Business teams build with AI, engineers control what ships. Open-source alternative to Lovable, Retool and n8n.

Web DevelopmentAI & Machine LearningData & DatabasesSelf-hostedDevOps & CloudAutomation & Workflows
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
22Distinct people
90Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
18.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Code-first platform for workflows, apps and AI agents, on the fastest self-hostable orchestrator (benchmarked against Airflow, Prefect and Temporal). Business teams build with AI, engineers control what ships. Open-source alternative to Lovable, Retool and n8n.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I love deno so much and all of its ideas highlighted in the article (dependency management, security, performance) so much that I've build an entire framework around making…

rubenfiszel used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:05:26 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year90 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-03-13 18:09:03 UTC to 2026-09-23 15:52:45 UTC.

010203040502022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 31 mentions; 0 submissions, 31 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 50 mentions; 2 submissions, 48 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 2 submissions, 4 comments20242025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC31031
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC50248
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC624
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312

What Hacker News says

50 sources
rubenfiszel·Nov 23, 2023
Yes it goes in that direction, however note that you can already do this in a not too hard way. Our openflow spec is both open-source and has a full openapi definition: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/openflow... you can use that to generate client sdks in any languages and build your own dag with it. That's what one of our customer did building a reactflow to openflow library: https://github.com/Devessier/reactflow-to-windmill It's not as good as the decorator way but we move fast and if you still have interest for it we could prioritize it (and ask for feedbacks :))
In Fast self-hostable open-source workflow engine
RandomBK·Nov 23, 2023
I would love to begin using this system, but the licensing is giving me serious pause. While most of the software is under the AGPLv3, the Commercial License section of the README [0] implies that the company takes on a fairly broad interpretation of the AGPL. In particular, the line "[...] to build a feature on top of Windmill, to comply with AGPLv3 your product must be AGPLv3 [...]" seems to imply the company aligns with the stance taken by Google and other companies: that even calling the application via API is enough to trigger copyleft [1]. This implies that if I were to build a sign-up form that triggers a Windmill workflow in the backend, my entire application would either need to be AGPLv3 or I would need a commercial license. That's perfectly reasonable, as it means any non-AGPL use will have to contribute back to Windmill via a
Read the rest
commercial license. However, it does mean positioning this as an "Fully Open-source" alternative to Airflow is only technically correct. This is much closer in practice to "source available" than how most developers would think as "open source". If this isn't how Windmill wants their license interpreted, I highly encourage clarifying things. [0] https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill#commercial-license [1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
In Fast self-hostable open-source workflow engine
rubenfiszel·Nov 20, 2023
Looks cool and thanks for sharing. Founder of windmill.dev, an open-source, extremely fast workflow engine to run jobs in ts,py,gosh whose most important piece, the queue, is also just rust + postgresql (and mostly the FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED). I'd be curious to compare performances once you guys are comfortable with that, we do them openly and everyday on: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/tree/benchmarks I wasn't aware of the skip B-tree splits and the REINDEX CONCURRENTLY tricks. But curious what do you index in your jobs that use those. We mostly rely on the tag/queue_name (which has a small cardinality), scheduled_for, and running boolean which don't seem good fit for b-trees.
In River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres
rubenfiszel·Sep 28, 2023
Interesting post and would like to bring nuance as the founder of an open-source alternative to Retool and Airplane: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill Our enterprise edition is clearly cheaper (between 2-5x cheaper based on customers migrating away from those) than our competitors but we bet on volume and lack of sales team to make it up for it in terms of margins. There are pragmatic reasons for it, our community/oss edition is featureful and include SSO so there is a temptation for our customers to just roll with the CE and we cannot be too greedy. One could argue that support should be sufficient since the jobs ran by windmill are critical, but the main strength of a product like this is reliability and since we achieve near 100% reliability, it isn't sufficient. We are not gonna intentionally make our product less reliable on
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CE. The other reason in my opinion is deeply rooted with the nature of open-source: software cost nothing to replicate and it would be a shame to have users not benefit from the right tools just so the pricing can extract as much $$$ as possible. So ultimately it comes down to the tension between being VC funded (and we are but to a much lesser extent that our prop alternative) and the pricing of open-source. I am deeply convinced that there is a compromise that satisfies everyone by having the different force in presence being kept-in-check. VCs want small seed companies to scale to become global companies; customers and users want to invest in a platform they know they won't have to regret later because of rent-seeking or lock-in practices. True OSS helps companies achieve global scale as long as their product is better (which make me agree with the substance of the post, being cheap is not enough) and also ensure that company can never or hardly employ dark patterns otherwise OSS fork of company's product will be too competitive against itself. Before being a founder, I was among the most skeptical of OSS with VC backing and I really understand why someone would have a hard stance on it. But I came to realize that good software takes not only lots of hard work, but a focus and a dedicated team that is hard to find without a core team that has strong incentives to make something that people want. So I see the future being dominated by companies that fall somewhere in the following spectrum: 1. OSS products that are public utilities and there are enough needs or the project is interesting enough to have a strong core team that doesn't require VC backing 2. OSS products that are more commercially oriented and have values but wouldn't exist without VC backing 3. OSS products that were able to bootstrap themselves completely and are COSS but without VCs And proprietary software to slowly become extinct as the world of software become more competitive everyday as the potential grow larger and the number of VCs that will fund open-source grow larger (and the ability to bootstrap those businesses also get easier).
In Open Source does not win by being cheaper
rubenfiszel·Sep 24, 2023
We use exactly this for windmill (OSS Retool alternative + modern airflow) and run benchmarks everyday. On a modest github CI instance where one windmill worker and postgres run as containers, our benchmarks run at 1200jobs/s. Workers can be added and it will scale gracefully up to 5000jobs/s. We are exploring using Citus to cross the barrier of 5000j/s on our multi-tenant instance. https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/tree/benchmarks
In Choose Postgres queue technology
rubenfiszel·Jun 29, 2023Submission

Show HN: Build a discord/Slack bot to answer questions with your docs and GPT4

It works on top of the open-source workflow engine windmill [1] that you can easily self-host on a tiny server or a large k8s cluster. You will also need pgvector (here hosted on supabase) and of course a GPT4 api key. It showcases an approval step so that you only provide answers you are confident giving to your users, which feels less robotic. All the building blocks are scripts that you can reuse outside of windmill and you could build this in any other workflow engines (although less conveniently). We use it for our own needs on discord [2] and thoughts this was a common need for any product having community support on slack or discord. [1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill [2]: https://discord.com/invite/V7PM2YHsPB
144 points · Open discussion

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