Restate

What hackers pick instead

• TemporalRecommended for reliable long-running workflows with built-in retries, persisted state and crash recovery; critics call it overkill for small tasks, heavy to self-host and pricey on Cloud.138recommend
• DBOSRecommended for durable workflows and queues on Postgres, with far less complexity than Temporal. Common caveat: scaling and executor elasticity sit behind a paid tier.39recommend
• Apache AirflowWidely used open-source engine for scheduled ETL pipelines, valued for Python workflows and its UI; critics say it fits recurring jobs better than durable or database-aware workflows.18recommend
• WindmillPeople recommend Windmill as a dependable workflow engine that integrates well with Python, Postgres and DuckDB. The most common caveat is its licensing.11recommend
• Absurd WorkflowsRecommended as a minimal, simple durable workflow engine that leaves you full control over how it is used.11recommend

Every quote

The 25 most detailed of 27 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “A remote control for your agents”

2. Restate is not only a durable execution engine but a durable runtime that also provides consistent state and reliable communication.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation”

3. We get automatic failure recovery, interruptions for new input, great scalability, and scale-to-zero without any custom retry code.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “A Durable Coding Agent – With Modal and Restate”

4. The docs are pretty good and development locally and deployment to k8s was simple.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Go-Native Durable Execution”

5. do a lot of the heavy lifting to get the idempotency, exactly once and recovery

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Designing a Passively Safe API”

6. I persist the temporary state on Restate and permanent state on SurrealDB

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Benchmarking SurrealDB 3.x vs. Postgres, Mongo, Neo4j and Redis (With Fsync)”

7. Restate was built for agents before agents were cool.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Absurd Workflows: Durable Execution with Just Postgres”

8. matches your model of a self contained binary

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “DAG Workflow Engine”

9. you have to operate that orchestrator and its data store in production (and it's a single point of failure)

   Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Show HN: DBOS Java – Postgres-Backed Durable Workflows”

10. Restate made several decisions I consider questionable for the system's availability and stability

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation”

11. Versioning becomes an infrastructure property you don't need to think about, rather than something you solve in code.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Updating AI Agents safely in production”

12. which on paper should scale well and be definitely more lightweight and simple to setup, worth having a look

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “SQLite is all you need for durable workflows”

13. Replit migrated their whole coding agent from Temporal over to Restate, a pretty big setup.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation”

14. Restate.dev for payment integrations on northflank since its faster than cf workflows

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows”

15. Something like Restate actually implements distributed transactions.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower”

16. This could avoid the need to maintain the 1000 row inventory.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled”

17. Restate steps commit individually, unlike local activities.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation”

18. Restate has a more flexible programming model.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation”

19. OVH/uTask, OVH/cds, Restate, Woodpecker CI

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw”

20. It actually does many more useful things.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation”

21. Restate will often be a more natural fit

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation”

22. The TypeScript SDK was easy to use.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “How to think about durable execution”

23. OVH/cds, Restate, Woodpecker CI

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Aqua: A CLI message tool for AI agents”

24. restate seems even lighter

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation”

25. Restate is not open-source (BSL) while dbos (core, anyway) and temporal are

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Go-Native Durable Execution”