// the find
windmill-labs/windmill
Open-source developer platform to power your entire infra and turn scripts into webhooks, workflows and UIs. Fastest workflow engine (13x vs Airflow). Open-source alternative to Retool and Temporal.
Windmill is a self-hostable platform for turning scripts (Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash, and more) into scheduled jobs, webhooks, and internal UIs. The backend is Rust pulling from a Postgres job queue; the frontend auto-generates forms from typed function signatures. It targets teams that keep rebuilding the same internal tooling scaffolding.
1. Using Postgres as the job queue is the right call at this scale — no Redis, no Kafka, one fewer moving part, and the ~50ms pull-to-start latency is real and documented. 2. Type-driven UI generation actually works: TypeScript parameter types become form fields, union types become dropdowns, and resource types get a picker. This cuts out a whole class of internal tool glue code. 3. nsjail + PID namespace isolation means scripts can't read worker memory or escape to the host — meaningful security boundary for a platform that runs arbitrary user code against production credentials. 4. Docker Compose self-host is genuinely three files and one command; Helm charts exist for Kubernetes. The operational surface area is reasonable.
1. The license is a trap. The README says AGPLv3 but the Community Edition Docker image ships proprietary non-public code alongside it. Building any managed service or redistributable product on this requires a commercial license — 'AGPLv3' on the badge is not the full story. 2. The '13x faster than Airflow' benchmark is self-published and compares against a tool designed for data pipeline DAGs, not low-latency job dispatch. It tells you nothing about how Windmill performs under real load on your workloads. 3. Postgres-as-queue scales until it doesn't. There's no guidance on when you'll hit contention or what the migration path looks like; you'll find out under production load. 4. The community edition binary includes code you cannot inspect or audit, which is a real concern for a platform that stores workspace encryption keys and runs scripts with access to your secrets.