Argo Workflows

Argo Workflows orchestrates multi-step jobs on Kubernetes: data pipelines, CI/CD, ML training, batch processing, all defined as directed acyclic graphs in YAML.

Each step in your workflow runs as a container on your cluster. You get parallelism, retries, conditionals, loops, and artifact passing between steps. The web UI shows you the DAG visually with real-time status. It's a CNCF graduated project, which means serious production adoption.

Used by Intuit, Tesla, Google, and many others. Completely free. Apache 2.0 license. Akuity offers commercial support and Argo CD (related but separate) as a managed service, but Argo Workflows itself is free. Small teams already on Kubernetes who need workflow orchestration beyond simple CronJobs should look here. If you're NOT on Kubernetes, this isn't for you. The entire model assumes K8s.

The catch: you need Kubernetes. That's a hard prerequisite. And YAML workflow definitions get painful fast for complex pipelines. The learning curve combines Kubernetes complexity with workflow engine complexity. Not for the faint of heart.