# 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 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.

## Adoption signals

- Open source: temporalio/temporal — 22,983 stars, 1,894 forks (GitHub, checked 2026-09-12)

## iScore

57 / 100 (80% interval 51–64), rank 9 of 10 in queues — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Read this score with care:
- Capabilities is thin: 0 of 1 criteria are scored, so it sits near the category middle with a wide interval (4–100). Read the interval, not the point.
- Documented but not scored, because the page states it as text with no comparable number or a yes/limited/no (a one-time, usage-based or other-vendor price, or a per-site choice): minimum_paid_price, concurrency_limit, queue_retention. Read them on the provider page; the score neither rewards nor penalises what it could not compare.

Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every queues peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/queues/temporal/alternatives/

- Price: 28 (10–46), weight 31%, 3 of 4 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: minimum_paid_price
- Capacity and limits: 53 (47–60), weight 25%, 3 of 5 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: concurrency_limit, queue_retention
- Capabilities: 58 (4–100), weight 6%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: dead_letter_queue
- Trust and compliance: 75 (63–86), weight 18%, 12 of 12 criteria scored
- Evidence: 98 (98–98), weight 10%, 4 of 4 criteria scored
- Adoption: 85 (75–95), weight 10%, 1 of 1 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: No ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Kind of free offer: Free credit ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Credit card to start: Yes — Card required to sign up for Temporal Cloud; not charged in the first 90 days while credits remain. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing.md), read 2026-09-27)
- Entry paid plan: 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Pricing model: 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Startup credit program: Temporal Cloud startup credits: $6,000, for funded startups that have raised $30M or less. ([source](https://temporal.io/startup), read 2026-09-11)

### Infrastructure

- Regions: 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), read 2026-09-13)
- Uptime SLA: 99.9% on the pay-as-you-go Temporal Cloud plan (no base fee), with 99.99% High Availability options. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-27)

### Queues

- Included per month: 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing.md), read 2026-09-27)
- Maximum message size: 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), read 2026-09-13)
- Message retention: 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. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Maximum delay: Timers (durable sleeps) may run up to 100 years in Temporal Cloud. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/limits), read 2026-09-13)
- 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. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/limits), read 2026-09-13)

### Support

- Support on entry paid plan: 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/pricing), read 2026-09-27)
- Response time commitment: 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. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/evaluate/cloud/support), read 2026-09-27)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: SOC 2 Type II certified; trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA badges. ([source](https://temporal.io/security), read 2026-09-13)
- ISO 27001: 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/dpa), read 2026-09-13)
- HIPAA: Temporal Cloud is stated to be compliant with HIPAA regulations; HIPAA listed among trust-center certifications. ([source](https://temporal.io/security), read 2026-09-13)
- GDPR / data residency: GDPR compliant with a DPA reflecting GDPR; Namespaces do not share data processing or storage across regional boundaries. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/security), read 2026-09-13)
- PCI DSS: 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. ([source](https://temporal.io/terms-of-service), read 2026-09-13)
- Encryption at rest: Persistence layer and Elasticsearch index encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM; TLS 1.3 in transit. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/security), read 2026-09-13)
- Customer-managed keys: 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. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/evaluate/cloud/security), read 2026-09-27)
- Role-based access control: 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. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/manage-access/roles-and-permissions), read 2026-09-27)
- Private networking / VPC: AWS PrivateLink or GCP Private Service Connect to Namespaces, alongside the default public endpoints. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/connectivity), read 2026-09-13)
- Dedicated infrastructure: 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. ([source](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/security), read 2026-09-13)

## 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/)
- [Temporal vs Amazon SQS](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-temporal/)
- [Temporal vs Azure Queue Storage](https://inetgeek.com/compare/azure-queue-storage-vs-temporal/)
- [Temporal vs Cloudflare Queues](https://inetgeek.com/compare/cloudflare-queues-vs-temporal/)
- [Temporal vs Google Cloud Pub/Sub](https://inetgeek.com/compare/google-pubsub-vs-temporal/)
- [Temporal vs Upstash QStash](https://inetgeek.com/compare/qstash-vs-temporal/)
- [Temporal vs Zeplo](https://inetgeek.com/compare/temporal-vs-zeplo/)