SHSelfHostIndex

Conductor OSS vs Temporal

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted automation & workflows options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
CO Conductor OSS Microservices and workflow orchestration engine VS TE Temporal Durable execution platform for reliable distributed workflows
FeatureConductor OSSTemporal
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score98 · Excellent97 · Excellent
CategoryAutomation & WorkflowsAutomation & Workflows
LicenseApache-2.0MIT
LanguageJavaGo
Setup difficultyHardHard
Min. RAM2,048 MB2,048 MB
Deploymentdocker, kubernetes, bare-metaldocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 32,227★ 23,263
First released20162019
ReplacesAWS Step Functions, CamundaAWS Step Functions, Azure Logic Apps

What are Conductor OSS and Temporal?

Conductor OSS

Conductor is a platform created to orchestrate microservices and business processes at scale. It lets teams define workflows as JSON and run them across distributed task workers.

  • JSON-defined workflows
  • Distributed task workers
  • Visual workflow editor
  • Built for microservice orchestration

Read the full Conductor OSS guide →

Temporal

Temporal is an open-source platform for building durable, reliable workflows in code. It guarantees that long-running business processes survive failures, restarts and infrastructure changes.

  • Durable execution guarantees
  • Workflows written in general-purpose code
  • Automatic retries and state persistence
  • SDKs for many languages

Read the full Temporal guide →

Conductor OSS vs Temporal: key differences

Conductor OSS is written in Java, while Temporal is built with Go. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Conductor OSS versus MIT for Temporal. Conductor OSS is the more established project (first released 2016), while Temporal arrived in 2019.

Why pick each one

Choose Conductor OSS if…

  • Battle-tested at scale
  • Language-agnostic workers

Watch out for

  • Java stack is resource heavy
Conductor OSS details

Choose Temporal if…

  • Extremely reliable for long workflows
  • Strong multi-language support

Watch out for

  • Operationally complex to self-host
Temporal details

Frequently asked questions

Is Conductor OSS or Temporal better?

Neither is universally better. Conductor OSS has the larger community; both share a hard setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Conductor OSS and Temporal free and open-source?

Yes. Conductor OSS is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Temporal under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Conductor OSS and Temporal with Docker?

Conductor OSS: yes. Temporal: yes.

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