Windmill
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 5 of 12 workflow engines by recommenders
People recommend Windmill as a dependable workflow engine that integrates well with Python, Postgres and DuckDB. The most common caveat is its licensing.
People recommend Windmill as a dependable workflow engine that integrates well with Python, Postgres and DuckDB. The most common caveat is its licensing.
12 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 11
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 92%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 11 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 11 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Named alongside Dagu and Rivet
“Let me introduce you to a few of my friends: Make, Task, Dagu, Windmill, Rivet, Inngest”
Comment from 23 Feb 2026 in “Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw” “Dagu, Windmill, Rivet, Inngest”
Comment from 23 Feb 2026 in “Aqua: A CLI message tool for AI agents”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Licensing situation is not great
“the licensing situation is not great”
Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev environments”
Other workflow engines people recommend
The four most recommended other workflow engines, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Temporal | 138 | 43 | 76% | 12 | 1 yr13 owners | Approved |
| DBOS | 39 | 9 | 81% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Apache Airflow | 18 | 5 | 78% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Restate | 16 | 3 | 84% | 10 | — | Approved |
| WindmillThis page | 11 | 1 | 92% | 6 | — | Approved |
What people said
12 of the 16 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“without the nice ui given by these tools”
“We're betting on this too at”
“Big fan of Windmill here! Use it heavily. The way you guys integrate seamlessly with Bun/DuckDB/Postgres/Python is just fantastic.”
“Windmill looks to have an excellent community around it.”
“gives you some observability out of the box and protect secrets from llm is nice”
“it's much more controlled than OpenClaw”
“Dagu, Windmill, Rivet, Inngest”
“Let me introduce you to a few of my friends: Make, Task, Dagu, Windmill, Rivet, Inngest”
“Boring? Maybe. Dependable? Yes.”
“there's too much "sorry not in the open-source edition, please buy the entreprise edition" stuff all around, which makes it quite unusable”
“the licensing situation is not great”
“I really like windmill.dev which should support your scenario just fine”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.