Agentic Index
Hatchet Run vs Kestra (2026)
Two open source orchestrators with different centres of gravity, at 9 and 12 of 14.
Hatchet is a durable engine for agents, background tasks and mission critical workflows on Postgres, with retries, checkpointing and observability, MIT licensed. Kestra is event driven orchestration unifying data, AI, infrastructure and business workflows behind declarative YAML, with AI native agents, human in the loop approvals and more than twelve hundred plugins. Hatchet is code first and agent shaped; Kestra is declarative and platform shaped, and the plugin count tells you which one expects to run your whole estate.
Choose Hatchet Run if
- Agents and background tasks are the workload and you want an engine built for them.
- Code first beats YAML for how your engineers want to express workflows.
- MIT licensing on the whole engine matters for your deployment.
Choose Kestra if
- Documented coverage is materially broader and human in the loop approvals are built in.
- Data and infrastructure workflows sit alongside AI in the same platform.
- Twelve hundred plugins is the integration breadth your estate needs.
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