Temporal durably runs your workflows. But an agentic system is far more than a workflow engine — it also needs agents, memory, streaming, APIs, and governance. With Temporal you source, integrate, and operate each of those yourself. Akka delivers them as one runtime, at higher guarantees.
Temporal gives you an engine for durably running long workflows. That is one layer of an agentic system. The agents, the memory, the streaming, the API layer, and the governance are pieces you select, wire together, and operate around the orchestration core — and you own every failure across those seams.
Temporal Cloud runs that orchestration layer under a 99.99% SLA. The services you bolt on around it run under their own SLAs, or none.
Akka gives you agents, durable state, streaming, APIs, and governance as one pre-integrated runtime — built on the same durable-execution principles Temporal is 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.
| Dimension | With Temporal | With Akka |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Durable execution of long-running workflows — the orchestration layer. Agents, 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 | 99.99% on High-Availability / multi-region namespaces — about 52 minutes a year — with ~20-minute RTO and sub-1-minute RPO, covering the orchestration layer. | 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. A durable memory layer is bolted on and adds roughly 200 ms per access. | Durable state held in memory, active-active replicated — 4 ms reads, sub-10 ms writes. |
| Programming model | Workflow code must be strictly deterministic, because recovery replays history. LLM calls are non-deterministic and must be wrapped in activities; any library with internal randomness has to be audited or replaced. | Natural Java or Scala — state is event-sourced and the runtime handles recovery, with no determinism constraint on your code. |
| Governance | SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA cover the infrastructure. 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 | Per-action billing — every step, signal, query, and timer is metered ($50 to $25 per million) — and that meter covers orchestration only; the other layers are provisioned and billed separately. | 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. |
It comes down to whether governance sits inside the runtime or beside it. Temporal 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
Temporal holds SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA — security compliance for the infrastructure. It publishes no AI-governance capability: no real-time policy enforcement, no decision explainability, no human pause or override of a running process, no immutable interaction ledger, and no pre-deployment classification.
Any AI governance is a separate tool you add and operate. Those tools read logs after the fact — they 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 Temporal when you need durable execution for long-running workflows, when you are orchestrating steps rather than running autonomous agents, and when your team is ready to select, integrate, and operate the memory, streaming, API, and governance layers around it — and to keep workflow code strictly deterministic.
Reach for Akka when you are building an agentic system rather than a single workflow — agents, memory, streaming, APIs, and governance — and you want them pre-integrated and operated under one SLA, with recovery and governance built in and no determinism constraint on your code.
A sample of agentic and real-time systems on Akka Platform:
Akka Platform builds, runs, and governs the entire agentic system under a contractual SLA — orchestration included, on the same durable-execution principles Temporal is built on. Tell us what you are building, and we will show you how it runs in production.
