---
title: "About Workhorse"
description: "What Workhorse is, who publishes it, what it promises, and where its source lives."
canonical: "https://workhorse.run/about"
---

# About Workhorse

> What Workhorse is, who publishes it, what it promises, and where its source lives.

Workhorse is a durable job queue that lives inside PostgreSQL. An application enqueues a job in
the same transaction that writes its own data, so the job and the data commit together or not at
all. Workers in TypeScript, Python, and Go claim and run those jobs through one SQL protocol, and
the database keeps the evidence: every attempt, checkpoint, wait, and outcome is a row an operator
can query.

## Who publishes it

Stablemates publishes Workhorse and maintains it in the open at
[github.com/stablemates/workhorse](https://github.com/stablemates/workhorse). The packages are
released under the Apache License 2.0, and contributions are accepted under the contributor
agreement in that repository. There is no paid tier today. The beta withholds nothing; a later
commercial product would be new files under its own licence, not a second licence of the same
code.

## What ships

Three lines ship from the same repository and speak the same protocol:

- The TypeScript package `@stablemates/workhorse` on npm, which also carries the schema tool, the
  worker runtime, the operator dashboard, and the `workhorse` command line.
- The Python distribution `stablemates-workhorse` on PyPI.
- The Go module `github.com/stablemates/workhorse/go`.

The current published version of each line, and which versions receive fixes, are on
[Releases](/docs/releases). The tested runtimes and PostgreSQL versions are on
[Compatibility](/docs/compatibility).

## What it promises, and what it does not

Workhorse is a public beta. It is usable for evaluation and early production adoption. A minor
release may change behaviour, so read the changelog before you upgrade. Inside a major line a
migration only adds, so a running deployment upgrades in place and is never asked to recreate its
database.

Handlers run at least once, PostgreSQL is the only supported database, and there is no separate
workflow definition language: durable steps are composed in ordinary handler code.
[Limitations](/docs/limitations) lists every boundary with the workaround where one exists, and
[Core concepts](/docs/concepts) explains the model behind the guarantees.

## Where to start

[Quickstart](/docs/quickstart) installs the schema and runs a first job. Coding agents start at
[Workhorse for AI coding agents](/docs/for-ai-agents), and [llms.txt](/llms.txt) indexes every page
in a form an agent can read. Questions and bug reports go to the channels on [Contact](/contact).