Overview
Dagu is a Go-based workflow orchestration tool that models pipelines as Directed Acyclic Graphs defined in YAML. It provides a built-in web UI for visualizing DAGs, monitoring run history, and manually triggering workflows. Dagu supports cron scheduling, retries, email notifications, and parallel step execution. It requires no external database — state is persisted to the local filesystem — making single-binary or Docker deployment straightforward.
Where it falls short of Zapier
- No distributed worker pool — all steps run on the same host, limiting horizontal scale
- No built-in secrets vault; credentials must be managed via environment variables or external tools
- UI is functional but lacks advanced features like parameterized run forms or dynamic DAG generation
- Community is smaller than Airflow or Prefect; fewer integrations and plugins
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
Tags
Claim this listing to keep it accurate, add a deploy template, or feature it on relevant pages.
Embed the Dagu difficulty badge in your README — it links back here.
[](https://openreplace.com/dagu)Similar open-source projects
Other self-hostable tools in the same space worth comparing.
Fair-code workflow automation with 400+ integrations and native AI nodes
Programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows as Python DAGs
Monitor any website for changes and get notified instantly
Event-driven orchestration platform for scheduled and API-triggered workflows