Tako vs Temporal
Before Inngest, before Trigger.dev, before any of the JavaScript-native step-function platforms, there was Temporal. The Temporal team (and Cadence before it at Uber) effectively invented the durable-execution category: the idea that you can write ordinary code with sleeps, retries, and signals, and have the runtime persist every step so your business logic survives crashes, deploys, and week-long waits. Every workflow engine shipped since — including Tako’s — owes Temporal a debt.
The difference is what comes with the durability.
At a glance
| Temporal | Tako | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment model | Cluster (Frontend, History, Matching, Worker) | Embedded in tako-server |
| Persistence | Cassandra, MySQL, or PostgreSQL | Per-app SQLite file |
| Visibility | Elasticsearch (advanced) or DB (basic) | Rows in the same SQLite file |
| Workers | Separate fleet, any language | Subprocess, scale-to-zero |
| Durable primitive | workflow.sleep, workflow.waitForSignal, activities | step.run, step.sleep, step.waitFor |
| Billing (cloud) | $50 per million Actions | None — runs on your VPS |
| Open source | Yes, MIT (~19.7k stars) | Yes, part of Tako |
| Languages | Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, PHP, .NET, Ruby | TypeScript and Go |
What Temporal gets right
Temporal’s credentials are not up for debate. Uber, Netflix, Stripe, Snap, Coinbase, Datadog, and a long list of other large engineering orgs run real production workloads on it. The model — determinism-enforced workflow code, activities as side-effect boundaries, event-sourced history — is rigorous in a way that younger engines still look up to. Seven first-class SDKs. A mature Web UI with powerful search. Cross-datacenter replication. Signals, queries, child workflows, schedules, batch operations. When your job is “orchestrate tens of thousands of long-running processes across a platform team of fifty,” Temporal is unambiguously the right answer.
The operational cost of that power is the cluster. A production self-hosted Temporal deployment is four Temporal services — Frontend, History, Matching, and Worker — plus a primary database (Cassandra, MySQL, or PostgreSQL) and, for anything beyond basic search, Elasticsearch for the visibility store. The Kubernetes operator exists for a reason. That’s not a knock — it’s the price of a real cluster. It’s just a price.
Where Tako is different
The cluster is a file
Tako’s workflow engine runs inside tako-server — the same process that already handles your app’s HTTP proxy, TLS, secrets, and scale-to-zero supervision. The “cluster” is one SQLite file at {tako_data_dir}/apps/<app>/runs.db with WAL enabled. The “worker fleet” is a subprocess that the supervisor spawns on demand. The “API” is a unix socket.
One binary, one file, one socket. tako deploy ships HTTP handlers and workflows/*.ts in the same release.
Same vocabulary, smaller surface
Tako’s SDK primitives — step.run for memoized side effects, step.sleep for durable waits, step.waitFor paired with signal, and cron via schedule — cover retries, long waits, human approvals, fan-out, and scheduled jobs. That’s the working set of what most apps need from a workflow engine. We deliberately skipped child workflows, queries, versioning APIs, and history replay knobs. If your system design genuinely needs those, Temporal is the correct tool.
No per-Action meter
Temporal Cloud bills per Action — roughly every workflow start, signal, activity completion, and heartbeat. At $50 per million Actions, pricing is fair and predictable for the platform it is. But it’s a meter that runs on every step.run equivalent, forever. Tako’s workflow engine runs on the $5 VPS you were going to pay for anyway. The marginal cost of one more workflow run is the CPU it uses.
Different ambitions
Temporal is a durable-execution platform, and the cluster, the seven SDKs, and the Cloud product exist because Netflix-scale workloads actually need them. If that’s your problem, go use Temporal — it will serve you well for a decade.
Tako is building a different thing: the platform layer between your code and the internet for teams who want backend primitives — deploy, TLS, secrets, channels, workflows — without standing up a separate cluster for each one. One tako-server on one box. One tako.toml. Durable is just a keyword.
If you’ve been running Temporal in production for years, we’re not here to move you. If you’ve been staring at the self-host docs thinking “I just need step retries for this side-project,” give Tako a try.