↓Skip to main content
EN

Русский

Deutsch

Español

Italiano

Français

한국어

Português

中文

العربية

日本語

English

Temporal, Restate, Hatchet, Inngest: A Comparative Analysis of Open Source Workflow Management Projects

·1379 words·7 mins

Today, there are various open-source solutions available for reducing the complexity of distributed system development and ensuring robust workflow management. This report provides an in-depth comparative analysis of four key open-source projects: Temporal, Restate, Hatchet, and Inngest.

Overview and Core Concepts
#

Temporal
#

Temporal is a durable execution platform that abstracts the complexity of building distributed systems. It preserves the complete application state even in the event of host or software failures, allowing for seamless migration to other machines1. Temporal supports accelerating development by eliminating the need for custom code for timers, event sourcing, state checkpoints, retries, and timeouts2.

Temporal is used by thousands of companies, including Stripe, Netflix, Datadog, HashiCorp, Alaska Airlines, and Box, for both mission-critical workloads and core workloads. It is reported that every message from Twilio, every transaction on Coinbase, and every story on Snap utilizes Temporal1.

Restate
#

Restate is a durable execution engine for building stateful serverless applications. By writing code that resembles a typical RPC service, the engine saves the progress of execution and can restore the previous state after a crash to resume execution from the last point3.

Additionally, Restate automatically suspends execution in scenarios such as long latencies or delays in responses from other services, ensuring that computing resources are not wasted. This means that during “waiting time,” Knative services can scale to zero3.

Hatchet
#

Hatchet is a distributed, fault-tolerant task queue designed to solve scalability issues like concurrency, fairness, and rate limiting4. It replaces unwieldy legacy queues or pub/sub systems, enabling the design of durable workloads that can recover from failures and tackle various scalability issues5.

Hatchet offers low latency (with an average startup time of 25ms) and high-throughput scheduling, integrated with strategies like FIFO, LIFO, Round Robin, and Priority Queue, allowing for common scalability issues to be bypassed with minimal configuration6.

Inngest
#

Inngest is an open-source durable workflow platform operational across all clouds. It allows for stateful, long-running step functions in code, automatically retrying upon failures7. It abstracts queues, event streams, and states, enabling developers to focus on code.

Founded in 2021 by Dan Farrelly, former CTO of Buffer, and Tony Holdstock-Brown, a former engineer at Docker, Inngest received $3 million in seed funding led by GGV in 20238.

Technical Feature Comparison
#

Architecture and Tech Stack
#

Temporal employs a gRPC library written in Go, providing development abstraction that preserves complete application state9. It uses a worker pattern, where clients execute workflow functions while the actual workflow is carried out by the worker9.

Restate exposes services over an HTTP/2 server and can be deployed alongside Knative for serverless applications3. It is provided as a single binary, simplifying execution and operations, and is developed in Rust for resource efficiency and resilience10.

Hatchet supports transaction queuing and DAG-style execution based on Postgres. It claims to enable horizontal scaling across multiple regions and vertical scaling above 10k TPS by leveraging features like SKIP LOCKED and recent PG releases (like active-active replication)11.

Inngest has designed and built its own queuing system, supporting multi-tenancy, batching, and debouncing, and is transitioning to FoundationDB. The backend is primarily written in Go and uses caching, ClickHouse, event streams, and orchestration7.

Supported Languages
#

The programming languages supported by each project are as follows:

  • Temporal: While not explicitly stated, Go seems to be the primary language.
  • Restate: Supports Golang, Java, Kotlin, Typescript, Rust, and Python3.
  • Hatchet: Provides open-source SDKs for Python, Typescript, and Go5.
  • Inngest: Offers SDKs for Typescript (47%), Go (48%), Java, and Python, with cross-language function calls available712.

Feature Comparison
#

Temporal:

  • Preservation of complete application state and migration to other machines1
  • Automatic handling of timers, event sourcing, state checkpoints, retries, and timeouts2
  • Elimination of the need for queues, pub/sub systems, and schedulers1

Restate:

  • Durability provided through RPC service-style code3
  • Restoration of the previous state and resumption of execution after crashes3
  • Automatic suspension of execution to save resources during long latencies3
  • Implementation of state machines, event processing, sagas, asynchronous tasks, and more13

Hatchet:

  • Ultra-low latency (average startup time of 25ms) and high-throughput scheduling6
  • Built-in strategies, including FIFO, LIFO, Round Robin, and Priority Queue4
  • Custom retry policies and integrated error handling4
  • Support for Cron, one-time scheduling, spike protection, and progressive streaming4

Inngest:

  • Multi-tenant aware flow control (concurrency, throttling, debounce, prioritization)14
  • Support for inter-language function calls7
  • Batch processing, grouping many events into a single function call7
  • Improved dashboards, built-in tracking, and metrics7
  • Advanced recovery tools like function replay, pause, and mass cancelation7

Use Cases and Applications
#

Temporal
#

Temporal is suitable for use cases like service orchestration, transaction processing, infrastructure management, asynchronous tasks, and job scheduling1. It is particularly used for mission-critical workloads by large enterprises like Stripe, Netflix, Datadog, HashiCorp, Alaska Airlines, and Box1.

Restate
#

Restate is well-suited for workflows, event-driven applications, implementing saga patterns, and stateful event processing3. When used with Knative, it allows for building stateful serverless applications even in situations of low availability. It can also build diverse applications like workflows, sagas, and stateful event handling (combined with Knative Eventing)3.

Hatchet
#

Hatchet is appropriate for use cases like fairness for generative AI (distributing requests fairly to prevent busy users from overwhelming the system), batch processing for document and image indexing, workflow orchestration for multi-modal systems, and accuracy for event-driven processing4.

Inngest
#

Inngest is suitable for use cases like AI agent workflows, fairness for generative AI, batch processing for document indexing, and workflow orchestration for multi-modal systems14. It also supports AI-related chain step functions, search/RAG indexing and data pipelines, integrations, webhooks, and payment and billing flows7.

Strengths and Weaknesses Analysis
#

Temporal
#

Strengths:

  • A stable platform that has been validated by thousands of companies1
  • High reliability due to complete application state preservation1
  • 100% open-source solution provided under the MIT license1

Weaknesses:

  • It may be challenging to analyze behavior as it operates across Go, Rust, and TypeScript9
  • The internal structure is complex, making it hard to analyze data transmission information at the protocol level9

Restate
#

Strengths:

  • Provided as a single binary, making execution and operation straightforward10
  • Resource-efficient and resilient (built in Rust)10
  • Can be deployed as a serverless/stateless HTTP server3

Weaknesses:

  • Being a relatively new project, it may have a smaller ecosystem compared to Temporal
  • Deployment strategies may be complex (deploying stateful on a k8s cluster or using the Restate Cloud managed service)3

Hatchet
#

Strengths:

  • Based on Postgres, reducing the risk of data loss (compared to Redis-based solutions)11
  • Offers low latency (average startup time of 25ms) and high-throughput scheduling6
  • Built-in observability features for application developers11

Weaknesses:

  • Currently uses RabbitMQ as a pub/sub system, requiring additional dependencies11
  • Considering using NATS for engine-to-engine and engine-to-worker connections, which is still under development11

Inngest
#

Strengths:

  • Developer-friendly SDK and concise API design7
  • Offers a Dev Server for local development, making testing and debugging easier14
  • Provides multi-tenant aware flow control14

Weaknesses:

  • The SSPL license may pose usability challenges for some businesses15
  • Major languages include Go (48%) and TypeScript (47%), which may limit support for other languages12

Licensing and Community
#

Temporal is provided under the MIT license and is developed as open source with an active community1. The licensing for Restate is not clearly specified in the search results. Hatchet is also offered under the MIT license5. Inngest is provided under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and includes delayed open-source publication (DOSP) under the Apache 2.0 license7.

Conclusion
#

All four open-source projects offer solutions for durable execution and workflow management but have unique approaches and strengths.

Temporal is the most mature and widely adopted solution, suitable for mission-critical workloads. Restate focuses on stateful serverless applications and excels in resource efficiency. Hatchet, built on a Postgres-based task queue, reduces the risk of data loss while offering developer-friendly observability features. Inngest emphasizes developer experience and provides a workflow platform operating across all clouds, with multi-tenant aware flow control.

Choosing a project may depend on specific requirements, existing tech stacks, and team expertise. However, all four solutions share a common goal of abstracting the complexity of distributed systems and allowing developers to concentrate on business logic.

References
#

The above information is based on publicly available information relating to Temporal116217189, Restate31310192021, Hatchet452262311, and Inngest87151214242526.

  1. https://github.com/temporalio ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. https://temporal.io ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. https://knative.dev/blog/articles/Building-Stateful-applications-with-Knative-and-Restate/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. https://news.hada.io/topic?id=13722 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. https://hatchet.run ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41604042 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  8. https://appmaster.io/en/news/inngest-receives-3m-in-seed-funding-led-by-ggv ↩︎ ↩︎

  9. https://swcho.github.io/blogs/2023-12-25-temporal-2 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. https://restate.dev ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39643136 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  12. https://openalternative.co/inngest ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  13. https://github.com/restatedev/restate ↩︎ ↩︎

  14. https://www.inngest.com ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  15. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31910762 ↩︎ ↩︎

  16. https://www.opensourcealternative.to/project/temporal ↩︎

  17. https://web.temporal.io ↩︎

  18. https://aws.amazon.com/startups/offers/temporal?lang=en ↩︎

  19. https://docs.restate.dev ↩︎

  20. https://www.contributor.fyi/restate ↩︎

  21. https://github.com/restatedev ↩︎

  22. https://docs.hatchet.run/home ↩︎

  23. https://openalternative.co/hatchet ↩︎

  24. https://www.inngest.com/blog/open-source-event-driven-queue ↩︎

  25. https://github.com/inngest ↩︎

  26. https://github.com/inngest/inngest ↩︎