kadence vs cadence: which one you actually want

Start with the finding that decides whether you should keep reading. I typed kadence vs cadence into a search engine and counted what came back: a Wikipedia article on the given name, a Wiktionary entry, a baby-name poll, three more Wikipedia articles, Merriam-Webster, a word-comparison site, and a Wikipedia page about a trade-secret lawsuit between two chip-design companies.

Not one software product in nine results. If you typed that phrase because you are choosing how to spell a child's name, the answer is that Cadence is the standard spelling and Kadence is the variant, and nothing below concerns you.

Everyone else is here because they heard a tool's name said out loud and cannot work out which one it was. That is a harder problem than the spelling, because there are at least six pieces of software in play and two of them do genuinely similar things.

The six

The one with a K is the last row. Everything else is a C.

If you meant Uber's Cadence, you will know quickly. It was created in 2017, has 9,452 stars, runs as a server cluster, and orchestrates distributed workflows in Go, Java, Python and Ruby. It has nothing to do with tracking tasks in a repository, and its documentation will make that obvious within a paragraph.

If you meant Cadence Design Systems, you are very far away. That one sells electronic design automation software to people who make chips, and the only reason it shows up here is that a lawsuit it was party to ranks for the spelling comparison.

The one that actually overlaps

favcrm/cadence is the reason this page needed writing rather than being a spelling note.

It coordinates Claude, Codex, Cursor and Devin sessions across terminals, taking work from planning through verified delivery. Its README says the board tracks issues as folders of Markdown files under ~/pm, that there is exactly one writer implementation so every write is one git commit, and that the audit trail comes from git alone. Git-backed task state for coding agents, no hosted backend, no account. Said aloud, it is indistinguishable from this project, and the overlap is real rather than nominal.

Here is where they actually differ, which is more useful than a feature list.

It is a controller; this is a record. cadence drives agent sessions — it starts them, attaches to terminals, and gates delivery. kadence does none of that. It writes down what happened and answers questions about it. If what you want is something to run your agents, the C spelling is the correct one and this page has done its job by sending you there.

Files against events. cadence keeps one Markdown file per issue and edits it in place, with git commits as the history. kadence appends events and folds the current state on read. That split is the real design decision in this whole category, and it is the one worth understanding before picking either: editable files are readable without any tool at all, and they are the ones that collide when two branches change the same task. Across 8,396 merge commits in 130 public repositories using file-based trackers, task-file conflicts hit 15% of repositories and 89% of those were content conflicts.

That number is not an argument that cadence is wrong. It keeps one writer behind every change, which is a legitimate way to attack the same problem from the other end.

What each costs to start. cadence needs a local daemon running (cadence daemon start), tmux, and the provider CLIs authenticated separately; its README puts the development stage at implementation in progress. kadence is a CLI at version 0.8.1, 125 KB packed, no daemon and no network call.

Ages. cadence was created on 2026-09-16, two weeks after this project on 2026-09-02. Both have almost no stars. Neither of us is the established option, and anyone telling you otherwise about either project is guessing.

thomas-powers-jr/cadence is the third one worth a sentence, because it is also about agents and also uses a dot-directory. It is not a tracker — it is a gate that refuses to let an agent close work it only claims is done, re-deriving each acceptance criterion from evidence. It would sit happily beside either of the two above.

How to search so you get the right one

This is the practical part, and it is measured rather than guessed.

is kadence the same as cadence workflow returns nine pages about Uber's engine and nothing about the journal — the engine's own summary of that search said it could not find Kadence as a distinct product and asked for clarification. cadence git task tracker for coding agents returns favcrm/cadence fifth and sixth, and the journal nowhere.

So the spelling on its own will not save you, because search engines correct toward the common word. What works is the noun, not the spelling:

• want the journal — search kadence git journal, and it is the first result
• want the terminal controller — search cadence coordinate coding agents
• want Uber's engine — search cadence workflow and go to cadenceworkflow.io
• want the verification gate — search cadence acceptance criteria agents

If you only remember one thing: a K and the word journal gets you here, and a C and the word workflow gets you a distributed orchestration engine that will not help you track a task.

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