Restate vs Temporal: Why Your Ops Setup Matters More Than Your Code

Restate and Temporal are both durable execution engines that journal each completed step and replay it after a crash, preventing issues like double charges or lost reservations. The key difference lies not in how they handle durability, but in what you must operate: Restate runs as a single binary, while Temporal requires a cluster of four independently scalable services backed by an external database. Temporal's stack includes Frontend, History, Matching, and internal Worker services, with PostgreSQL or MySQL for persistence and optionally Elasticsearch for advanced workflow search. A common misconception is that Temporal always requires Elasticsearch — SQL databases have supported advanced visibility since server v1.20, making it optional until query volumes grow. The article argues that teams should choose between the two based on their operational capacity rather than code preferences, since the application logic written for each platform is more similar than vendors typically acknowledge.