# Restate

16 Hacker News commenters recommended Restate and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for durable workflows and agents, with recovery, retries and state built in. Main caveat: critics question its availability and single point of failure.

## Why people recommend it

- Automatic failure recovery and retries (2 comments): "We get automatic failure recovery, interruptions for new input, great scalability, and scale-to-zero without any custom retry code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798968)) "do a lot of the heavy lifting to get the idempotency, exactly once and recovery" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46835203))
- Durable state alongside execution (2 comments): "Restate is not only a durable execution engine but a durable runtime that also provides consistent state and reliable communication." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698421)) "I persist the temporary state on Restate and permanent state on SurrealDB" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357877))
- Fits AI agent control flow (2 comments): "it turns out the primitives it provides, journaling every step, giving each execution a stable ID, map really well onto the control problem for agents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47046120)) "Restate was built for agents before agents were cool." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45829563))
- Simple local and Kubernetes deployment (2 comments): "The docs are pretty good and development locally and deployment to k8s was simple." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47217731)) "matches your model of a self contained binary" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48012643))

## What people warn about

- Availability and single point of failure (2 comments): "you have to operate that orchestrator and its data store in production (and it's a single point of failure)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927717)) "Restate made several decisions I consider questionable for the system's availability and stability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700144))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Temporal](https://hackerapproved.com/p/temporal.md): 138 recommend
- [DBOS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dbos.md): 39 recommend
- [Apache Airflow](https://hackerapproved.com/p/airflow.md): 18 recommend
- [Windmill](https://hackerapproved.com/p/windmill.md): 11 recommend
- [Absurd Workflows](https://hackerapproved.com/p/absurd.md): 11 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Restate", https://hackerapproved.com/p/restate/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).