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Temporal vs Zeplo

SEPT 2026 audit

A comparison of Temporal and Zeplo built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 28 criteria comparedSources last checked

The short answer

Choose 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.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Choose 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.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Consider something else if…

  • Temporal: You want to budget by counting jobs: pay-as-you-go bills from $50 per million Actions, a unit that does not map onto messages or task runs, plus storage and 10% of usage for support; the $150 starting credit lasts 90 days.
  • 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.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: Temporal alternatives · Zeplo alternatives

14 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.

Visit Temporal documentationVisit Zeplo documentation

No affiliate links, sponsored placements or paid rankings appear on this site. Ordering follows the sourced data and the stated criteria.

01.

At a glance.

CriterionTemporalZeplo
Pricing
Free tier
No
Yes
Kind of free offerFree creditFree tier
Entry paid planNo plan fee or minimum: pay-as-you-go has no base monthly fee and bills usage from $50 per million Actions, plus storage and Developer support at 10% of usage. New accounts start with $150 in credits valid for 90 days. The Business support add-on starts at $500/month.$39/month for Company, including 1,000,000 requests and three team members. Additional members are $15 each.
Pricing modelPay-as-you-go per Action with no base monthly fee: from $50 per million Actions, falling with volume to $25 self-serve. Storage is billed separately per GB-hour ($0.042 active, $0.00105 retained), and Developer support costs 10% of usage. The Business support add-on is the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage.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.
Infrastructure
Regions20 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.
Queues
Included per monthNo monthly Actions allocation on pay-as-you-go, which bills every Action used. Business includes 2.5 million Actions a month, and Enterprise and Mission Critical include 10 million. An Action is Temporal's own unit (a workflow operation) and is not comparable to a message, operation or 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 retentionClosed workflow Event History is kept for a Retention Period set per Namespace, up to 90 days on Temporal Cloud; longer needs the Export feature. Business includes 2.5 GB Active and 100 GB Retained Storage. Recorded without a magnitude: this is workflow-history retention, not how long an undelivered message survives.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.
Concurrency500 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).
Compliance
GDPR / data residency
GDPR compliant with a DPA reflecting GDPR; Namespaces do not share data processing or storage across regional boundaries.
Privacy policy permits storage, processing and transfer of personal information between any of the countries in which Zeplo operates. zeplo.io policy, last updated February 7, 2022; the newer v2.zeplo.io policy is silent on transfers.
Encryption at restPersistence layer and Elasticsearch index encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM; TLS 1.3 in transit.Privacy policy states industry-standard measures including encryption in transit (TLS), encryption at rest, and access controls. v2.zeplo.io policy, last updated February 21, 2026; no cipher or key-management detail published.
Role-based access controlPredefined account-level roles (Account Owner, Global Admin, Developer, Finance Admin, Read-Only) plus Namespace-level permissions (Admin, Write, Read-Only), with optional Custom Roles for granular access.Workspaces support multiple members with role-based access; roles are admin, member and viewer. Team invites are managed in the dashboard under Settings, Team; the API invite endpoint takes the same three roles.
Dedicated infrastructureTemporal Cloud is a multi-tenant service; Namespaces are logically segregated and do not share data processing or data storage across regional boundaries. No single-tenant or dedicated-cell option is offered anywhere in the Cloud docs or the plan matrix.Not listed on the Developer or Company plans; the pricing page says to contact sales for custom volume, SLAs or dedicated infrastructure. From the "Need more?" block under the Developer (free) and Company ($39/mo) plan cards.

Only criteria both providers publish appear here; a tinted cell marks a real difference. Criteria only one of them documents are listed below, and an absence there means we found no source — not that the feature is missing. How we source this.

The small bar above a value is inetGeek's own lean toward that side — computed from the same facts shown, never a number the provider published. See the picker below "The short answer" to weigh only the criteria you care about.

02.

Where they differ.

Free tier

Temporal
No
Zeplo
Yes
Sources (2) →

Kind of free offer

Temporal
Free credit
Zeplo
Free tier
Sources (2) →

Entry paid plan

Temporal
No plan fee or minimum: pay-as-you-go has no base monthly fee and bills usage from $50 per million Actions, plus storage and Developer support at 10% of usage. New accounts start with $150 in credits valid for 90 days. The Business support add-on starts at $500/month.
Zeplo
$39/month for Company, including 1,000,000 requests and three team members. Additional members are $15 each.
Sources (2) →
  • Temporal Platform Pricing Options | Temporal ↗

    “No commitment. No minimums. [...] Pay-As-You-Go Starting at $50 per million actions Get started for free Free $150 credits for 90 days No base monthly fee $0.042/GBhr Active Storage $0.00105/GBhr Retained Storage Developer support for 10% of usage [...] Business Starting at $500/month”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Pricing — Zeplo ↗

    “Company [...] $39 /month 1M requests included $10 / million requests Team size: 3 users [...] Addition team members $15 $15 $15”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Pricing model

Temporal
Pay-as-you-go per Action with no base monthly fee: from $50 per million Actions, falling with volume to $25 self-serve. Storage is billed separately per GB-hour ($0.042 active, $0.00105 retained), and Developer support costs 10% of usage. The Business support add-on is the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage.
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.
Sources (2) →
  • Temporal Platform Pricing Options | Temporal ↗

    “Pay-As-You-Go Starting at $50 per million actions [...] No base monthly fee $0.042/GBhr Active Storage $0.00105/GBhr Retained Storage Developer support for 10% of usage 99.9% SLA and 99.99% HA Options SSO via SAML Volume Discounts Self service down to $25 per million actions [...] Price: Greater of $500/mo or 10% of usage”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Pricing — Zeplo ↗

    “Jobs Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited Included team members 1 3 Custom Addition team members $15 $15 $15 Log retention 30 days 30 days 30 days”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

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.
Zeplo
Hosted on Google Cloud Platform; no selectable region is offered and data may be transferred between countries.
Sources (2) →
  • Service regions - Temporal Cloud | Temporal Documentation ↗

    “Temporal Cloud operates in the following Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions: Asia Pacific - Tokyo ( ap-northeast-1 ) [...] Temporal Cloud operates the following Google Cloud (GCP) regions: North America - Iowa ( us-central1 )”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Privacy Policy - Zeplo ↗

    “Zeplo currently uses the following services to store your information: Google Cloud Platform Cross-border data transfers Information that Zeplo collects may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

Included per month

Temporal
No monthly Actions allocation on pay-as-you-go, which bills every Action used. Business includes 2.5 million Actions a month, and Enterprise and Mission Critical include 10 million. An Action is Temporal's own unit (a workflow operation) and is not comparable to a message, operation or execution elsewhere in this category.
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.
Sources (2) →
  • Temporal Cloud Pricing ↗

    “Some plans include a monthly Actions allocation (2.5M on Business, 10M on Enterprise/Mission Critical). [...] On the Temporal Cloud pay-as-you-go model, you are only billed for what you use (actions, storage, support).”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Pricing — Zeplo ↗

    “Free 500 requests included $20 / 100k requests [...] $39 /month 1M requests included $10 / million requests”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

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.

Zeplo

256 KB inline request body (unlimited via S3 offload); plan payload caps are 64 KB on Developer and 1 MB on Company.

Sources (2) →

Message retention

Temporal
Closed workflow Event History is kept for a Retention Period set per Namespace, up to 90 days on Temporal Cloud; longer needs the Export feature. Business includes 2.5 GB Active and 100 GB Retained Storage. Recorded without a magnitude: this is workflow-history retention, not how long an undelivered message survives.
Zeplo
30 days of log retention on every plan — free, Company and Enterprise alike. The longest window in this category by a wide margin.
Sources (2) →

Maximum delay

Temporal

Timers (durable sleeps) may run up to 100 years in Temporal Cloud.

Zeplo

30 days (2,592,000 seconds) maximum delay_seconds per request.

Sources (2) →

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.
Zeplo
API rate limit rather than a concurrency figure: 100 requests/min on Developer (Free) and 2,000 requests/min on Company ($39/mo).
Sources (2) →

GDPR / data residency

Temporal
GDPR compliant with a DPA reflecting GDPR; Namespaces do not share data processing or storage across regional boundaries.
Zeplo
Privacy policy permits storage, processing and transfer of personal information between any of the countries in which Zeplo operates. zeplo.io policy, last updated February 7, 2022; the newer v2.zeplo.io policy is silent on transfers.
Sources (2) →
  • Security model - Temporal Cloud | Temporal Documentation ↗

    “Namespaces in the same environment are logically segregated. Namespaces do not share data processing or data storage across regional boundaries.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Zeplo Privacy ↗

    “Information that Zeplo collects may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which Zeplo operates to enable the use of the information in accordance with this privacy policy. [...] You agree to such cross-border transfers of personal information.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

Encryption at rest

Temporal
Persistence layer and Elasticsearch index encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM; TLS 1.3 in transit.
Zeplo
Privacy policy states industry-standard measures including encryption in transit (TLS), encryption at rest, and access controls. v2.zeplo.io policy, last updated February 21, 2026; no cipher or key-management detail published.
Sources (2) →

Role-based access control

Temporal
Predefined account-level roles (Account Owner, Global Admin, Developer, Finance Admin, Read-Only) plus Namespace-level permissions (Admin, Write, Read-Only), with optional Custom Roles for granular access.
Zeplo
Workspaces support multiple members with role-based access; roles are admin, member and viewer. Team invites are managed in the dashboard under Settings, Team; the API invite endpoint takes the same three roles.
Sources (2) →
  • Roles and permissions | Temporal Documentation ↗

    “Some account-level roles, such as Account Owner and Global Admin, automatically have Namespace Admin permissions on all Namespaces in the account. [...] For more granular access control, you can also use Custom Roles to define specific permissions for specific Temporal Cloud resources and assign them to any principal. [...] You can grant Namespace Admin, Write, or Read-Only permissions to principals with the account-level roles of Developer, Finance Admin, or Read-Only.”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Zeplo Docs - FAQ ↗

    “Yes. Workspaces support multiple members with role-based access (admin, member, viewer).”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

Dedicated infrastructure

Temporal
Temporal Cloud is a multi-tenant service; Namespaces are logically segregated and do not share data processing or data storage across regional boundaries. No single-tenant or dedicated-cell option is offered anywhere in the Cloud docs or the plan matrix.
Zeplo
Not listed on the Developer or Company plans; the pricing page says to contact sales for custom volume, SLAs or dedicated infrastructure. From the "Need more?" block under the Developer (free) and Company ($39/mo) plan cards.
Sources (2) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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03.

Documented by only one.

These criteria are published by one provider and not the other. An absence here means we have not found a source, not that the feature is missing — except where we say we read the other provider's own page on a given date and it does not state it. Those rows lean, and the provider can correct them with a link.

What the free plan includesZeplo: 500 requests a month, described as free forever, for a single developer with 30-day log retention.
Credit card to startTemporal: Yes — Card required to sign up for Temporal Cloud; not charged in the first 90 days while credits remain.
When the free offer endsZeplo: Never — 500 requests a month, free forever.
Startup credit programTemporal: Temporal Cloud startup credits: $6,000, for funded startups that have raised $30M or less.
Uptime SLATemporal: 99.9% on the pay-as-you-go Temporal Cloud plan (no base fee), with 99.99% High Availability options.
Dead letter queueZeplo: Limited — Dead-letter handling is a webhook fired on permanently failed requests, not a separate queue you consume.
Support on entry paid planTemporal: Developer support comes with pay-as-you-go and is billed at 10% of usage. The Business support add-on, the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage, adds advanced technical support with a 2-hour P0 SLA in business hours.
Response time commitmentTemporal: P0 response: 1 business day on Developer (the pay-as-you-go support level), 2 business hours on Business, 30 minutes on Enterprise and 15 minutes on Mission Critical. No comparable number, because a business day is not a fixed span.
SOC 2Temporal: SOC 2 Type II certified; trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA badges.
ISO 27001Temporal: ISMS is informed by the NIST Cybersecurity Framework; the DPA's certification/assurance measure names only third-party SOC 2 Type II audits. Adjacent evidence: the DPA claims no ISO 27001 certificate, but no Temporal page explicitly denies one.
HIPAATemporal: Temporal Cloud is stated to be compliant with HIPAA regulations; HIPAA listed among trust-center certifications.
PCI DSSTemporal: Terms of Service bar customers from submitting payment card information to the Hosted Services; only contact name, title and email address are permitted. Clause 1.6 Personal Data; a contractual data restriction, not a statement about PCI DSS certification.
Customer-managed keysTemporal: 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.
Private networking / VPCTemporal: AWS PrivateLink or GCP Private Service Connect to Namespaces, alongside the default public endpoints.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Temporal or Zeplo?

Temporal: No plan fee or minimum: pay-as-you-go has no base monthly fee and bills usage from $50 per million Actions, plus storage and Developer support at 10% of usage. New accounts start with $150 in credits valid for 90 days. The Business support add-on starts at $500/month.

Zeplo: $39/month for Company, including 1,000,000 requests and three team members. Additional members are $15 each.

Free tier: Temporal or Zeplo?

Temporal: No

Zeplo: Yes

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.

Provider pages

TemporalDurable execution platform metered in Actions, with storage split between open and closed workflows, and a self-hosted open-source edition.ZeploHTTP request queue priced per request, with 30-day log retention on every plan including free.

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Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.