Kestra

Kestra is an open source orchestration platform founded in 2021 by CEO Emmanuel Darras and CTO Ludovic Dehon, built around a declarative, language agnostic approach to workflow automation. Where incumbent orchestrators like Apache Airflow are Python centric and demand specialized data engineering skills, Kestra defines workflows in simple YAML that can be written from a built in code editor or a no code UI, versioned in Git, and deployed through CI/CD. The company raised a twenty five million dollar Series A in March 2026 led by RTP Global, with Alven, ISAI, and Axeleo participating, bringing total funding to thirty six million dollars, and reports more than two billion workflows executed in 2025 across thirty thousand plus organizations including Apple, Toyota, JPMorgan Chase, Bloomberg, Deutsche Telekom, and BHP.

The platform unifies scheduled and event driven automation in one engine, triggered by cron, events, webhooks, or messages, and extends across more than one thousand two hundred plugins covering databases, cloud services, dbt, Spark, Terraform, Ansible, and messaging systems. Kestra 1.0, the long term support release, positions the product as declarative agentic orchestration: AI native agents can be powered by OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Mistral, Bedrock, Vertex AI, DeepSeek, or Ollama, combining memory with tools such as web search, code execution, and MCP clients, while a Copilot generates workflow YAML from natural language. Every agent action stays version controlled and auditable, with human in the loop approvals available at critical steps. Enterprise Edition adds SSO, RBAC, multi tenancy, audit logs, encrypted secrets, worker groups, and high availability, deployable on any cloud, on premises, or in air gapped environments, and a fully managed Kestra Cloud with usage based pricing is rolling out alongside the announced Kestra 2.0 distributed execution engine.

Kestra fits engineering and platform teams that want one governed control plane for data pipelines, infrastructure automation, and agentic workflows, especially in hybrid or regulated environments that need self hosting. It is a weaker fit for buyers wanting a turnkey business agent out of the box, since Kestra is the orchestration layer agents run on rather than a prebuilt vertical agent, and paid tier rates are not published.