Open source alternative to AWS Step Functions, Camunda Platform and Orkes
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Orchestrate durable workflows across distributed services with Temporal, an MIT-licensed open source platform you can self-host or run through Temporal Cloud.
Temporal tracks each step of a multi-service process and retries failed activities without losing the workflow state.
Skip if your process is a single short request that can finish inside one service transaction.
Use Temporal to consolidate cron jobs, queues, and manual retry scripts into versioned workflows with visible histories.
Skip if your team cannot operate the server and does not want a managed workflow service.
Long-running business processes are hard to build with only queues, cron jobs, and database status flags. Payment retries, order fulfillment, onboarding steps, and data pipelines can fail halfway through, leaving engineers to reconstruct state from logs and custom tables.
Managed workflow products reduce some pain but can lock teams into vendor-specific definitions, pricing, and operational limits. Engineering teams need workflows that behave like normal code while preserving state through crashes, deploys, and network failures.
Runs workflows that preserve progress across worker crashes, retries, and restarts, so business processes can continue from the last recorded event.
Developers write workflows in familiar languages instead of modeling every step in a cloud console or YAML-only workflow definition.
Separates workflow state from worker execution, letting teams scale workers independently for CPU-heavy, IO-heavy, or service-specific tasks.
Temporal and AWS Step Functions both coordinate multi-step work, but they use different operating models. Temporal is a code-first open source platform; Step Functions is a managed AWS service built around state machines.
Temporal is the better choice when teams want portable workflow logic, local development, and control over execution infrastructure. Step Functions is still better when the workload lives entirely inside AWS and the team wants AWS to own the workflow runtime.
Yes. Temporal Server is open source under the MIT license.
Temporal is used for durable execution of long-running workflows such as payments, provisioning, onboarding, data pipelines, and background jobs.
Temporal lets developers define workflows in application code and run the open source server themselves. AWS Step Functions is a managed AWS service with state machines defined for the AWS platform.
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