Conductor

Conductor is an open-source, event-driven workflow orchestration engine originally built at Netflix to orchestrate microservices, now maintained as Conductor OSS for durable application and AI agent workflows.

JavaMicroservicesDurable ExecutionJSONOpen Source

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Stars: 32,276
Forks: 1,030
Contributors: 425
Latest: 3.32.5

About Conductor

Netflix created Conductor in 2016 to coordinate microservices without tightly coupling them. Workflows are defined as JSON (or via SDKs) and composed of system tasks (HTTP, event, switch, fork/join, sub-workflow, wait) and worker tasks implemented in any language that poll Conductor for work. The server persists workflow state, handles retries, timeouts and rate limits, and exposes a UI for searching and debugging executions. After Netflix stopped maintaining the original repository in 2023, development continued as the community-driven conductor-oss project, with Orkes offering a managed version.

Key Features

JSON workflow definitions plus code-first SDKs

System tasks: HTTP, switch, fork/join, dynamic fork, sub-workflow, wait, event

Language-agnostic workers that poll for tasks

Durable state with retries, timeouts and rate limiting

Pluggable persistence (Redis, Postgres, MySQL, Cassandra) and indexing (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch)

Web UI for searching, visualizing and replaying executions

Pros

Proven at Netflix scale for microservice orchestration

Workers can be written in any language

Visual workflow diagrams and powerful execution search

Flexible deployment with multiple persistence backends

Cons

Running the server and its dependencies (database, index, queue) adds operational load

JSON workflow definitions can get verbose for complex logic

Project history split between Netflix and conductor-oss repositories

Smaller community than Temporal

Tool Information

Language: Java (server); SDKs for Java, Python, Go, JavaScript, C#
License: Apache-2.0
First release: 2016 (Netflix); conductor-oss since 2023
Latest version: 3.32.5
Maintainer: Conductor OSS community / Orkes

Used By

Netflix

Compare Conductor with other tools

See how Conductor stacks up against other workflow orchestration engines, feature by feature.