Temporal vs Conductor

Both are self-hosted platforms with several moving parts, so the effort is mostly about the components you run and the skills your team already has. A self-hosted Temporal Service runs Frontend, History, Matching and Worker services plus a persistence store and, for advanced visibility, a separate store such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch. Conductor needs a Java 21 or later server, a persistence backend such as PostgreSQL or Redis, and Elasticsearch or OpenSearch for indexing if you want search. Your team needs Kubernetes or Docker operations experience, database administration, and developers who can write deterministic workflow code (Temporal) or maintain JSON definitions and workers (Conductor). Ask each vendor or Orkes to walk through your target topology before you estimate staffing.

Yes, if you have engineers who already operate stateful services on Kubernetes or VMs, can manage upgrades, and can own the security configuration. Temporal's self-hosted security defaults are open: if no Authorizer is configured, the noopAuthorizer allows every API request, so access control, mTLS and SSO must be set deliberately. Conductor has its own hardening, authentication and network decisions to make. Outside help is most useful for the first deployment, for hardening against your policies, and for the upgrade process. DeployOpen plans, implements, hardens, backs up, upgrades and documents self-hosted platforms in your own infrastructure, and most engagements are fixed-scope with the scope agreed in writing before work starts.

No supplied figure gives a typical duration for either engine, so treat any number you hear as a guess until it is tied to a scope. The main drivers are the persistence and visibility stores you choose, whether you need mTLS and SSO on day one, how many workflow types and workers you must migrate or build, your CI and observability integration, and how many environments you need before production. For Temporal, the choice of Cassandra, PostgreSQL or MySQL and the Helm chart version compatibility with your server image add decisions early. For Conductor, the persistence backend, broker choice and worker languages set the early shape. Ask for a written scope that lists deliverables, environments and acceptance criteria before you compare timelines.

Plan for named owners in three areas: platform operations, application developers and security. Platform operators own the cluster, upgrades, backups and capacity. Developers own workflow code in Temporal, where determinism and versioning rules apply, or workflow JSON and workers in Conductor, where each worker must be kept in step with its task definitions. Security staff own authentication, authorization mapping, network exposure and payload handling. Temporal's documentation says services should run on hosts not reachable from the public internet, so network design needs an owner early. Ask any implementation partner which of these roles they will fill, which they expect your staff to fill, and how knowledge transfer is documented.

Yes, they remove part of it, but not the application work or your security decisions. Temporal Cloud is a managed service with pay-as-you-go pricing that starts at 50 US dollars per million actions, with storage charged per GB-hour, and advertised SLAs of 99.9% or 99.99% with high availability, per Temporal's pricing page. Orkes offers hosted deployments across major cloud providers and an enterprise platform built on Conductor OSS. A managed service still needs your workflow design, worker deployment, identity mapping and data classification. Before deciding, confirm where data resides, how payload encryption is handled, which features are enterprise-only, and what the contract guarantees in writing.

Conductor OSS is no longer maintained by Netflix. Netflix discontinued maintenance of Conductor OSS on GitHub effective December 13, 2023 and archived its repository in favor of an internal fork. The conductor-oss/conductor repository is Apache-2.0 licensed and is actively maintained by Orkes and the community, with Conductor v3.32.5 published on September 25, 2026. Long-term support therefore depends on the community project and on whether you buy Orkes Conductor, which is built on the OSS base with full compatibility. Ask Orkes about its support terms, the release cadence of the community project, and what happens to your version pinning if you move between the open and enterprise builds. Temporal's MIT-licensed server is maintained by Temporal Technologies, so the stewardship question is different there.

Migration is possible in principle but never a simple export, because the two engines model work differently. Temporal workflows are code with an ordered event history that is replayed, while Conductor workflows are versioned JSON graphs executed by workers in any language. Moving means redesigning definitions, re-implementing task logic in the target SDK, and deciding what to do with in-flight executions. Plan a cutover that drains running workflows, keeps both systems available during the transition, and tests replay or retry behavior explicitly. Reduce lock-in early by isolating business logic from orchestration code, documenting your workflow contracts, and keeping persistence and identity choices standard. A scoped assessment of the existing workflows is the practical first step.