Temporal vs Windmill
Side-by-side comparison of two AI agent tools
Short answer
- Temporal is growing faster: +673 GitHub stars in the last 30 days vs +317 for Windmill.
- Pick Temporal for: temporal service. Pick Windmill for: open-source developer platform to power your entire infra and turn scripts into webhooks, workflows and UIs.
From GitHub data refreshed daily.
Temporalopen-source
Temporal service
Windmillopen-source
Open-source developer platform to power your entire infra and turn scripts into webhooks, workflows and UIs. Fastest workflow engine (13x vs Airflow). Open-source alternative to Retool and Temporal.
Metrics
| Temporal | Windmill | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 23.4k | 18.1k |
| Star velocity /mo | 672.8571428571428 | 316.984126984127 |
| Commits (90d) | 564 | 1.3k |
| Releases (6m) | 10 | 10 |
| Overall score | 0.8373639688163125 | 0.8135943658053529 |
Pros
- +Automatic failure handling and retry logic eliminates complex error recovery code
- +Mature, battle-tested technology originally developed at Uber with strong reliability track record
- +Comprehensive tooling ecosystem including CLI, Web UI, and multi-language SDK support
- +Multi-language support with automatic UI generation from scripts in Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash, SQL, and more
- +High performance workflow engine claiming 13x faster execution than Airflow
- +Self-hostable open-source solution with AGPLv3 license providing full control and customization
Cons
- -Requires learning workflow-based programming paradigms which can have a steep learning curve
- -Additional infrastructure complexity requiring Temporal server deployment and maintenance
- -Overhead for simple applications that don't require durable execution guarantees
- -AGPLv3 license may restrict some commercial use cases and require careful compliance consideration
- -Being a comprehensive platform may introduce complexity for simple automation tasks
- -Self-hosting requires infrastructure management and maintenance overhead
Use Cases
- •Long-running business processes with multiple steps that need guaranteed completion
- •Microservice orchestration and coordination across distributed systems
- •Data processing pipelines requiring automatic retry and failure recovery mechanisms
- •Building internal APIs and webhooks from existing scripts without additional infrastructure
- •Creating automated workflows for background jobs and data processing pipelines
- •Developing low-code internal applications with custom UIs for non-technical team members
FAQ
- Which is more popular, Temporal or Windmill?
- Temporal has more GitHub stars (23,417 vs 18,087).
- Which is more actively developed, Temporal or Windmill?
- Windmill had more commits in the last 90 days (1,250 vs 564).
- Should I use Temporal or Windmill?
- Compare their capabilities, limitations and "best for" notes above. Both are open source, so trying each on a small task is the fastest way to decide.