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Orkes Conductor vs Temporal

Picking the right durable execution platform

Building resilient systems that scale well doesn’t need to be complicated. Orchestration platforms like Orkes Conductor or Temporal provide persistent state tracking, execution retries, and observability across distributed components.

But we know that enterprise teams need more than just durable execution. Faster development speed, native agentic AI, and deeper enterprise capabilities are key considerations that Orkes has engineered into its battle-tested orchestration platform.

Here’s how Orkes Conductor stacks up against Temporal.

Visual Workflow Editor

Build Workflows Visually

Build workflows as code? You got it. Even better? Build workflows with Orkes’ visual workflow editor. Drag and drop tasks, define the inputs, and add conditions and control flow. Unlike Temporal, you get full workflow visualization, even if you write workflows as code.
It’s faster, and easier to communicate between technical and non-technical teams.

Ship Fast with Pre-Built Components

Common functions are encapsulated as System Tasks or Operators, so you don’t need to spend time writing boilerplate code. Calling or polling an HTTP endpoint? Check. Publishing an event message? Check. Searching a vector database? Check. Orkes Conductor lets you move fast without losing the flexibility and control when you need custom logic.

Here’s all integrations across AI/LLMs, vector databases, message brokers and other enterprise systems and services.

Orkes Conductor Inegrations

Native Agentic Workflow Features

Move fast with Orkes’ native Agentic orchestration features like our built-in AI tasks and prompt management studio. Easily add the latest LLMs, test them with the newest prompt engineering tactics, and bring them to production in a matter of minutes.
Whether you are building a RAG system, an AI agent, or adding LLM capabilities to existing workflows, Orkes accelerates your growth.
Native Agentic Workflow Features illustration
High-level conductor server and scale manageability

Built for Scale and Reliability

First open-sourced in 2016, Conductor has been tested and refined in demanding production environments such as Tesla, American Express, and JP Morgan.
Its architecture, backed by Redis and Postgres, is designed to handle high throughput with lower resource overhead than Temporal. With Orkes Conductor, the noisy neighbour effect is eliminated with dedicated single-tenant clusters in your preferred cloud provider.

Scale Without Surprise Bills

Temporal’s pay-as-you-go pricing penalizes your growth. 
With Orkes’s cluster-based pricing, you’re free to build without counting executions, worrying about reruns, or managing storage limits. Scale confidently on Conductor’s resilient, high-availability infrastructure, even during demand spikes—without the fear of runaway costs.
Orkes Pricing and features snippet
Comparative Analysis

Orkes Conductor vs. Temporal

Orkes

TEmporal

Deployment Models

  • Orkes Cloud — Fully hosted and managed by Orkes
  • Customer Hosted — Managed clusters deployed in your cloud account (data and compute remains in your ecosystem)
  • On-Premise
  • Temporal Cloud — Fully hosted and managed by Temporal
  • Self Hosted

Cloud Infrastructure

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Flexible
  • Single or multi-tenant cloud
  • Your choice of AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-premise
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Fixed
  • Multi-tenant only cloud
  • Your choice of AWS or GCP

Single Sign On

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Okta, Azure Active Directory, Google, GitHub & any OIDC provider
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SAML-based only

Access Control

Granular RBAC for resources (workflows, tasks, secrets, domains, integrations, AI prompts)

  • User-based
  • Group-based
  • Service account-based

User roles and namespaces

Secret Management

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Securely store secrets and tokens to be used across workflows
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Orkes

TEmporal

Workflow Creation

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Code
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JSON DSL
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UI (Visual Workflow Editor)
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BPMN Importer
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Code

Visual UI

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Workflow Diagrams
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Visual Workflow Builder
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Workflow Execution Dashboards (Diagrams, Timelines)
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Workflow Execution Dashboards (Diagrams, Timelines)

Workflow Versioning

Fully supported, easy rollback and migration

Complicated configuration required

Workflow-Task Decoupling

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Loosely coupled, facilitating independent scaling and reuse
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Tightly coupled

Built-in System Tasks and Operators

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Native tasks for rapid development (HTTP,Event, HTTP Poll, Inline, Chat Completions, Store Embeddings, and more)
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Integrations

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Native integrations
  • Messaging brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc)
  • AI/LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, etc)
  • Databases (Pinecone, MongoDB, etc)
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Human-in-the-Loop Workflows

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Full support for in-workflow human input
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Workflow Signals

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Start, execute, pause, resume, terminate, restart, update task etc
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Start, execute, terminate, restart, update task etc

Schema Validation

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Custom implementation required

Brownfield Development

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Integrates easily with legacy systems, any framework or language — no need to re-architectexisting architecture
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Need to change existing architecture to incorporate workflow code

Supported SDKs

Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, C#, Clojure

Java, Python, TypeScript, Go, .NET, PHP

API Support

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Open Source License

Apache 2.0

MIT

Orkes

TEmporal

Parallelism

Supports tens of thousands of parallel tasks per workflow and millions of workflows daily, engineered to scale to billions

Can operate at large scales but limited by concurrency and parallelism of running workflows

Resilience

Supports workflow reruns, restarts, retries from failed tasks

Supports workflow reruns and restarts

Long Running Workflows

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Workflows with unlimited duration and the ability to be interrupted based on events
Supports long-running workflows (Interrupt support unknown)

Error Handling

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Automated retry mechanisms, error handling, and compensation workflows
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Support for the saga design pattern
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Automated retry mechanisms and error handling
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Support for the saga design pattern

Orkes

TEmporal

Workflow Monitoring

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Real-time workflow monitoring with visual insights
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Real-time workflow monitoring

Execution Visualization

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Full execution history:
  • Visual diagrams with all iterations and all possible branching paths
  • Timeline view
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Full execution history:
  • Linear timeline view

Workflow Monitoring

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Granular debugging with real-time task execution logs and visual I/O parameters
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Granular debugging with real-time task execution logs

Performance Metrics Dashboard

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Managed feature add-on (via Prometheus, Grafana, Open Telemetry, Datadog)
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Self-configured add-on (via Prometheus, Grafana)

Orkes

TEmporal

AI Tasks

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Built-in system tasks for common AI operations
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Custom implementation via code

Prompt Management

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Dedicated Prompt Studio for LLM prompt design and testing
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RBAC/ FGA support for access control
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Human-in-the Loop support

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Full support for in-workflow human input
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AI Integrations

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>10 integrations with top AI model providers and vector databases
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Experience the Orkes Difference