Agentic Index
Hatchet vs Kestra (2026)
Two open source orchestrators with different centres of gravity, at 9 and 12 of 14. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
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.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Hatchet and Kestra are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 969 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Hatchet 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.
| At a glance | Hatchet | Kestra |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Agent infrastructure | Agent infrastructure |
| Entry price | Free and open source to self-host under the MIT license, with PostgreSQL as the only required dependency; Hatchet Cloud is a managed service used by hundreds of companies, available to sign up and try. | Free open source edition; Enterprise Edition license and Kestra Cloud are quoted through sales with no published rates |
| Free / trial | Self-hosting is free under MIT; Hatchet Cloud can be signed up for and tried. | The open source edition is free forever, self hosted on Docker or Kubernetes |
| Pricing confidence | public partial | contact only |
| Feature | H Hatchet |
K Kestra |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
|
Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Knowledge & context | ||
|
Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
No / Not documented | Partial |
|
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Control & trust | ||
|
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
|
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
|
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Solution readiness | ||
|
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
Partial | Full / Explicit |
| Platform extensibility | ||
|
Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
No / Not documented | Full / Explicit |
|
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
Partial | Partial |
| Specialist automation | ||
|
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | H Hatchet |
K Kestra |
|---|---|---|
|
Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Free and open source to self-host under the MIT license, with PostgreSQL as the only required dependency; Hatchet Cloud is a managed service used by hundreds of companies, available to sign up and try. | Free open source edition; Enterprise Edition license and Kestra Cloud are quoted through sales with no published rates |
|
Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, partial | Contact only |
|
Billing Primary billing axis |
Open-source self-host free; Hatchet Cloud managed service usage. | license fees on top of a free open source core, scoped by organization size and features, plus usage based pricing on the managed Kestra Cloud |
|
Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
Medium variable cost | Medium variable cost |
|
Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tier
|
Free tier
|
|
Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Self-serve | Mixed |
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