# Temporal

138 Hacker News commenters recommended Temporal and 43 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 1 years (13 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended 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.

## Why people recommend it

- Durable execution with retries and state (8 comments): "every workflow instance can have a shit ton of long running state that gets persisted and rehydrated at will" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005281)) "Durable‑execution frameworks (DBOS/Temporal/etc.) give you retries, state, and consistency out of the box." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594747)) "Temporal does make it easy to mint an idempotency key by concatenating workflow run id and activity id" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46217201))
- Enforces good engineering, simpler app code (4 comments): "I see this as Temporal surfacing inherent complexity of the domain in a way that forces the developer to consider it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334094)) "I tried their Cloud offering and was appalled at their pricing. I burned through the $1,000 free credits before I even got something to production." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314464)) "You buy into more complexity upfront, but it makes the application code way simpler and easier to manage overall." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49697445))
- Beats building in-house or older orchestrators (4 comments): "solid failure-resistant infra. Companies could set the same thing up with an in-house team, but it's pretty great to be able to click a button" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49697345)) "It's only been a few months since I started deploying Temporal at work, and there's no way that I would try implementing all this in-house." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46837425)) "software rarely just works and impresses me and Temporal for my local machine orchestrating genuinely did" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337647))

## What people warn about

- Overkill and boilerplate for small tasks (5 comments): "At my current job we are forced to use Temporal for all background processing, which for small tasks is just a lot of boilerplate." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799403)) "Temporal is an AMAZING piece of software, however I don't believe it's a replacement for something more simple like Celery." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218956)) "a pretty large amount of overhead, both in performance and (I think more importantly) cognitive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49698479))
- Heavy self-hosting ops burden (4 comments): "They ship Helm charts so reality is somewhere between "helm deploy" and "substantial ops burden"." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48336693)) "Temporal is, in my opinion having run it in prod for over a year - poorly designed, slow and ridicliously heavy infra wise." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314087)) "paying more money than you expected for temporal's managed solution or taking on substantial ops burden" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329309))
- Expensive managed Cloud offering (2 comments): "I tried their Cloud offering and was appalled at their pricing. I burned through the $1,000 free credits before I even got something to production." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314464)) "paying more money than you expected for temporal's managed solution or taking on substantial ops burden" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329309))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [DBOS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dbos.md): 39 recommend
- [Apache Airflow](https://hackerapproved.com/p/airflow.md): 18 recommend
- [Restate](https://hackerapproved.com/p/restate.md): 16 recommend
- [Windmill](https://hackerapproved.com/p/windmill.md): 11 recommend
- [Absurd Workflows](https://hackerapproved.com/p/absurd.md): 11 recommend

## Cite as

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