# Temporal vs Zeplo

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/temporal-vs-zeplo/

Every value below is read from Temporal's and Zeplo's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Temporal | Zeplo |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Entry paid plan | $100/month for Essentials, including 1 million Actions, 1 GB active storage and 40 GB retained storage. Business starts at $500/month with 2.5 million Actions. | $39/month for Company, including 1,000,000 requests and three team members. Additional members are $15 each. |
| Pricing model | Per Action, with storage billed separately and split between open and closed workflows. Plans buy SLA tier and support response rather than volume — Essentials is 99.9% with one business day P0 response, Business adds scale. An open-source self-hosted edition runs the same service on your own infrastructure. | Per HTTP request rather than per message or per execution, with unlimited jobs on every tier and team size as a separate axis — three members included on Company, $15 for each beyond. |
| Regions | 20 regions for Temporal Cloud Namespaces: 14 AWS regions and 6 Google Cloud regions, each with a PrivateLink or Private Service Connect endpoint. | Hosted on Google Cloud Platform; no selectable region is offered and data may be transferred between countries. |
| Included per month | 1,000,000 Actions a month on Essentials and 2.5 million on Business. An Action is Temporal's own unit — a workflow operation — and is not comparable to a message, an operation or an execution elsewhere in this category. | 500 requests free, then $20 per 100,000. The Company plan includes 1,000,000 requests and charges $10 per million beyond — five times cheaper per request than the free plan's overage rate. |
| Maximum message size | 2 MB maximum payload per request (each Workflow/Activity argument or return value); 4 MB per Event History transaction, non-configurable. | 256 KB inline request body (unlimited via S3 offload); plan payload caps are 64 KB on Developer and 1 MB on Company. |
| Message retention | Storage rather than a time window: 1 GB of active storage for open workflows and 40 GB retained for closed ones on Essentials, 2.5 GB active on Business. Temporal keeps workflow event history, so retention is bounded by bytes rather than by days — recorded without a magnitude because it is not the quantity this criterion ranks. | 30 days of log retention on every plan — free, Company and Enterprise alike. The longest window in this category by a wide margin. |
| Maximum delay | Timers (durable sleeps) may run up to 100 years in Temporal Cloud. | 30 days (2,592,000 seconds) maximum delay_seconds per request. |
| Concurrency | 500 Actions per second per Namespace by default, auto-scaling above that with On-Demand Capacity; 20,000 Activity and 20,000 Workflow Task pollers per Namespace. | API rate limit rather than a concurrency figure: 100 requests/min on Developer (Free) and 2,000 requests/min on Company ($39/mo). |

## Where they differ

### Entry paid plan

- Temporal: $100/month for Essentials, including 1 million Actions, 1 GB active storage and 40 GB retained storage. Business starts at $500/month with 2.5 million Actions. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing))
- Zeplo: $39/month for Company, including 1,000,000 requests and three team members. Additional members are $15 each. ([source](https://www.zeplo.io/pricing))

### Pricing model

- Temporal: Per Action, with storage billed separately and split between open and closed workflows. Plans buy SLA tier and support response rather than volume — Essentials is 99.9% with one business day P0 response, Business adds scale. An open-source self-hosted edition runs the same service on your own infrastructure. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing))
- Zeplo: Per HTTP request rather than per message or per execution, with unlimited jobs on every tier and team size as a separate axis — three members included on Company, $15 for each beyond. ([source](https://www.zeplo.io/pricing))

### Regions

- Temporal: 20 regions for Temporal Cloud Namespaces: 14 AWS regions and 6 Google Cloud regions, each with a PrivateLink or Private Service Connect endpoint. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/regions))
- Zeplo: Hosted on Google Cloud Platform; no selectable region is offered and data may be transferred between countries. ([source](https://zeplo.io/privacy/))

### Included per month

- Temporal: 1,000,000 Actions a month on Essentials and 2.5 million on Business. An Action is Temporal's own unit — a workflow operation — and is not comparable to a message, an operation or an execution elsewhere in this category. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing))
- Zeplo: 500 requests free, then $20 per 100,000. The Company plan includes 1,000,000 requests and charges $10 per million beyond — five times cheaper per request than the free plan's overage rate. ([source](https://www.zeplo.io/pricing))

### Maximum message size

- Temporal: 2 MB maximum payload per request (each Workflow/Activity argument or return value); 4 MB per Event History transaction, non-configurable. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/limits))
- Zeplo: 256 KB inline request body (unlimited via S3 offload); plan payload caps are 64 KB on Developer and 1 MB on Company. ([source](https://zeplo.io/docs/limits/))

### Message retention

- Temporal: Storage rather than a time window: 1 GB of active storage for open workflows and 40 GB retained for closed ones on Essentials, 2.5 GB active on Business. Temporal keeps workflow event history, so retention is bounded by bytes rather than by days — recorded without a magnitude because it is not the quantity this criterion ranks. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing))
- Zeplo: 30 days of log retention on every plan — free, Company and Enterprise alike. The longest window in this category by a wide margin. ([source](https://www.zeplo.io/pricing))

### Maximum delay

- Temporal: Timers (durable sleeps) may run up to 100 years in Temporal Cloud. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/limits))
- Zeplo: 30 days (2,592,000 seconds) maximum delay_seconds per request. ([source](https://zeplo.io/docs/limits/))

### Concurrency

- Temporal: 500 Actions per second per Namespace by default, auto-scaling above that with On-Demand Capacity; 20,000 Activity and 20,000 Workflow Task pollers per Namespace. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/limits))
- Zeplo: API rate limit rather than a concurrency figure: 100 requests/min on Developer (Free) and 2,000 requests/min on Company ($39/mo). ([source](https://zeplo.io/docs/limits/))

## Which should you choose?

Pick Temporal if Long-running, stateful workflows where losing execution history is the failure that matters — Temporal keeps event history as first-class storage rather than logs that expire.

Pick Zeplo if Turning an HTTP endpoint into a queued, retried job without running a consumer — and keeping a month of logs while doing it, which nothing else here offers on a free plan.

Consider something else: Temporal — Entry is $100 a month before any usage, and the unit is an Action, which does not map onto messages or task runs — budgeting requires modelling your workflows, not counting jobs.

Consider something else: Zeplo — The free tier's overage is $20 per 100,000 requests, twenty times the Company plan's rate, so staying free past 500 requests is the most expensive way to use it.

## Documented by only one

- Startup credit program: Temporal: Temporal Cloud startup credits: $6,000, for funded startups that have raised $30M or less.
- SOC 2: Temporal: SOC 2 Type II certified; trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA badges.
- HIPAA: Temporal: Temporal Cloud is stated to be compliant with HIPAA regulations; HIPAA listed among trust-center certifications.
- GDPR / data residency: Temporal: GDPR compliant with a DPA reflecting GDPR; Namespaces do not share data processing or storage across regional boundaries.
- Encryption at rest: Temporal: Persistence layer and Elasticsearch index encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM; TLS 1.3 in transit.
- Customer-managed keys: Temporal: Client-side Data Converter encrypts payloads with your keys on your Workers before they reach Temporal Cloud, which cannot decrypt them; no server-side KMS option stated.
- Role-based access control: Temporal: Account-level roles (administrator, developer, read-only) plus Namespace-level permissions; custom roles, SAML and SCIM documented.
- Private networking / VPC: Temporal: AWS PrivateLink or GCP Private Service Connect to Namespaces, alongside the default public endpoints.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: Temporal or Zeplo?**

Temporal: $100/month for Essentials, including 1 million Actions, 1 GB active storage and 40 GB retained storage. Business starts at $500/month with 2.5 million Actions.
Zeplo: $39/month for Company, including 1,000,000 requests and three team members. Additional members are $15 each.

**Should I choose Temporal or Zeplo?**

Pick Temporal if Long-running, stateful workflows where losing execution history is the failure that matters — Temporal keeps event history as first-class storage rather than logs that expire.
Pick Zeplo if Turning an HTTP endpoint into a queued, retried job without running a consumer — and keeping a month of logs while doing it, which nothing else here offers on a free plan.