# Temporal

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/queues/temporal/

Durable execution platform metered in Actions, with storage split between open and closed workflows, and a self-hosted open-source edition.

## Who it suits

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.

Consider something else if 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.

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-06)

### Queues

- 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-06)

## Compared with

- [Temporal vs Inngest](https://inetgeek.com/compare/temporal-vs-inngest/)
- [Temporal vs Trigger.dev](https://inetgeek.com/compare/temporal-vs-trigger-dev/)
- [Temporal vs Hatchet](https://inetgeek.com/compare/hatchet-vs-temporal/)