Orkes Conductor orchestrates your workflows and agents. But an agentic system is far more than an orchestration engine — it also needs agents, memory, streaming, APIs, and governance. With Orkes you source, integrate, and operate each of those yourself. Akka delivers them as one runtime, on the same durability principles, at higher guarantees.
Orkes Conductor gives you a durable, event-driven engine for orchestrating long-running workflows and agents, descended from Netflix Conductor. Durable execution covers the workflow layer of an agentic system. In Conductor an agent is a workflow that calls an LLM to decide its next step; the durable memory, the streaming tier, the API layer, and the AI-governance stack are pieces you select, wire together, and operate around the orchestration core — and you own every failure across those seams.
Orkes Cloud runs that orchestration layer under an availability SLA of up to 99.99% on multi-region clusters. State lives in external datastores you provision and operate — Redis by default, Elasticsearch for indexing, pluggable Postgres, MySQL, or Cassandra — each under its own availability terms.
Akka gives you agents, durable state, streaming, APIs, and governance as one pre-integrated runtime — built on the same durable-execution principles that orchestration engines are known for, extended to the whole system. You describe the system you want, and the platform generates it, tests it, and runs it. Because everything runs in one runtime, a system that compiles is ready for production.
Akka keeps it running around the clock, with active-active replication and automatic failover, and stands behind a contractual 99.9999% availability SLA on the entire platform, backed by indemnities.
| Dimension | With Orkes | With Akka |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Durable orchestration of long-running workflows and agents — the orchestration core. Agents, durable memory, streaming, APIs, and governance are layers you select, integrate, and operate yourself. | Orchestration plus the whole system — agents, memory, streaming, APIs, and governance on one pre-integrated runtime, on the same durability principles. |
| Availability | Up to 99.99% on multi-region clusters — about 52 minutes a year — 99.9% on managed clusters, with service credits on confirmed breach. RTO and RPO are not published as numeric guarantees, and the SLA covers the orchestration platform. | 99.9999% on the entire platform — about 31 seconds a year — active-active, sub-1-minute RTO, zero-byte RPO. |
| State & memory | No native memory. State lives in external datastores you operate, and a durable memory layer is integrated through external vector databases. | Durable state held in memory, replayable from its event journal — 4 ms reads, sub-10 ms writes. |
| Agents | Agents are implemented as durable workflows that call an LLM, with the Agentspan runtime and an MCP/API gateway exposing tools. The memory, streaming, and governance around them are yours to assemble. | Native agents with tools, handoffs, guardrails, and interaction logging built into the runtime. |
| Governance | RBAC, audit logs, and secret management cover infrastructure security and operations. There is no AI-policy enforcement, explainability, or pre-deployment classification; any AI governance is bolted on and reads logs after the fact. | Risk teams define policies independently; the runtime enforces them on every action — HITL, HOTL, guardrails, evaluations — with no developer code, into tamper-evident storage. |
| Infrastructure cost | Managed-cluster or consumption pricing that covers orchestration only; you separately provision and operate the datastores, brokers, memory layer, and governance tooling around it. | One shared-compute runtime carries the same volume on up to 90% less infrastructure, at a fixed annual fee. Akka Optimize keeps improving the models on your own production traffic, so cost per task keeps falling as the system runs. |
The difference is where governance runs: inside the runtime, or in a separate service alongside it. Orkes certifies the infrastructure and leaves AI governance to tools you add on top. With Akka, risk and compliance write the policies independently of the agents, and the runtime enforces them on every action — with no developer code to customize.
Add it around the engine
Orkes holds SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA through isolated-cloud deployment — security compliance for the infrastructure — plus role-based access control, secret management, and audit logs. Temporal publishes no AI-governance capability: no real-time policy enforcement, no decision explainability, no human pause or override of a running agent as a platform primitive, no immutable interaction ledger, and no pre-deployment classification.
Any AI governance is a separate tool you add and operate. Log-based tools report after the fact and cannot gate a deployment or stop an action before it happens.
Block & escalate
With Akka, your risk and compliance teams write the policies themselves, in a separate versioned lifecycle that is independent of the agents — there is no developer code to customize. The runtime enforces every policy inline at the agent boundary, so human-in-the-loop approvals, human-on-the-loop halt switches, sanitizers, guardrails, evaluations, testing gates, and simulations all run before an action executes and block or escalate anything that does not pass.
Every call is traced automatically into petabyte-scale, tamper-evident storage, and that same trace data feeds continuous evaluations that keep running in production, right alongside your agents.
Reach for Orkes when you need durable orchestration of long-running workflows, when the work is coordinating steps and tools inside a larger system, and when your team is ready to select, integrate, and operate the memory, streaming, API, and governance layers around the orchestration core. Conductor carries a real orchestration heritage from Netflix and runs in production at large enterprises.
Reach for Akka when you are building an agentic system — agents, memory, streaming, APIs, and governance — and you want them pre-integrated and operated under one SLA, with recovery and governance built in on the same durability principles.
A sample of agentic and real-time systems on the Akka Agentic AI Platform:
The Akka Agentic AI Platform builds, runs, and governs the entire agentic system under a contractual SLA — orchestration included, on the same durable-execution principles Orkes Conductor is built on. Tell us what you are building, and we will show you how it runs in production.
