Spectio and other tools¶
Spectio is in design: its row describes what is specified, not what ships
What ships in which version: development environment §15. Owner of this page: documentation system §1. Every cell is sourced in the landscape note of 2026-10-26.
A neutral, factual comparison, with no pricing. Spectio is meant to sit next to these tools, not to replace them (decision 0001).
| Tool | Engines | Where it runs | Launch from UI or API | Live monitoring | Stop at a stage, review evidence, resume | Standards | Licence | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spectio (in design) | Nextflow, Snakemake; CWL and WDL later | self-hosted; runners next to the compute (local, Slurm, Kubernetes) under the user's own account | yes | yes (engine plugins) | yes (gates with checks and evidence) | RO-Crate export; GA4GH WES facade (planned) | MIT | specs |
| Seqera Platform | Nextflow | Seqera Cloud, or Enterprise on premises; reaches HPC over SSH by default, Tower Agent where SSH is not allowed; Slurm, LSF, PBS Pro, Grid Engine, Moab (Seqera HPC docs) | yes | yes | resume and relaunch, for Platform launches only; no review gate | — | proprietary | 2026-10-26 |
| nf-shard | Nextflow (Tower protocol) | self-hosted | no | yes | no | — | MIT; unmaintained since 2024 | 2026-10-26 |
| panoptes | Snakemake ≥ 9 (logger plugin 0.3.0; server 1.6.2, 2026-10-24) | self-hosted | no | yes | no (its cancel endpoint only marks a database row) | — | MIT | 2026-10-26 |
| snkmt | Snakemake ≥ 9 | local terminal (SQLite, NFS-aware) | no | yes | no | — | MIT | 2026-10-26 |
| FlowO | Snakemake ≥ 9 (server ≥ 9.23) | self-hosted (Docker Compose), reads outputs through a shared mount | no | yes (SSE), plus a versioned workflow catalogue, users and an MCP endpoint | none found [to be validated] | — | MIT | 2026-10-26 |
| Sapporo | CWL, Nextflow, Snakemake, WDL, others | self-hosted, engines in Docker; no built-in HPC | yes (WES) | run state | no (cancel only) | WES 1.1 with deviations, WRROC 0.5 | Apache-2.0 | 2026-10-26 |
| Galaxy | Galaxy workflows | self-hosted or public servers; HPC job runners | yes | yes | "Pause for dataset review" step | WES routes (declares 1.0.0), TRS consumer, DRS, WRROC | MIT since 2026-02-25 | 2026-10-26 |
| Arvados | CWL | self-hosted or cloud; Slurm, LSF | yes | yes | not found [to be validated] | — | AGPL-3.0 server, Apache-2.0 SDK | 2026-10-26 |
| Flyte 2 | Python; Nextflow through flyteplugins-nextflow and nf-flyte (since 2026-10) |
Kubernetes; Slurm over SSH with a configured key; on a cluster the Nextflow work directory must be on an object store | yes | yes | yes (conditions and signals, typed value) | — | Apache-2.0 | 2026-10-26 |
| Prefect 3 | Python | self-hosted or cloud; community Slurm worker | yes | yes | yes (pause or suspend, with typed input) | — | Apache-2.0 | 2026-10-26 |
For Snakemake, the panoptes and FlowO rows carry the corrections of 2026-10-26: monitoring tools exist, but there is no gate-and-steer tool for Snakemake. (decided — Thomas, 2026-10-27, inbox #27)
Where Spectio differs: shared POSIX file systems, the user's own account, Snakemake as well as Nextflow, and item-level QC gates with evidence (synthesis §1).