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 the agent framework, memory, API layer, and governance tools yourself. Streaming agent output with Workflow Streams is in public preview. Akka delivers them as one runtime, at higher guarantees.
Temporal gives you an engine for durably running long workflows. Durable execution covers the workflow layer of an agentic system. Temporal runs agents built with frameworks such as the OpenAI Agents SDK and Google ADK. Workflow Streams, in public preview, streams agent output to a user interface. The memory, the API layer, and the governance tools are pieces you select, wire together, and operate around the orchestration core, and you own every failure between them.
Temporal Cloud runs that orchestration layer under a 99.99% SLA on High Availability namespaces. 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. Agent frameworks, memory, APIs, and governance are layers you select, integrate, and operate yourself. Workflow Streams adds durable streaming of agent output in public preview. | 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 | Workflow state persists in the Event History. Agent memory across workflow executions comes from a third-party integration such as xMemory. | 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. Temporal ships no AI-policy enforcement, explainability, or pre-deployment classification of its own. Partner integrations such as Tenuo add guardrails that check each Activity before it runs. | Akka Verify applies any control to any AI system and guarantees its enforcement, including HITL, HOTL, guardrails, and evaluations, with a tamper-evident record of each. |
| Spec-driven delivery | Temporal skills for coding agents and a knowledge-base MCP server teach an AI assistant the Temporal programming model. Temporal offers no tool that builds a system from a written specification or checks it against acceptance criteria. | Akka Specify builds agentic systems from your specifications and releases only what meets your definition of done. |
| Model optimization | Temporal documents no model routing, fine-tuning, distillation, or model registry. Integrations call models through OpenRouter, Baseten, Fireworks AI, and Together AI from Activities. | Akka Optimize puts each request on the best model for the task, including smaller models trained on your data. |
| 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. |
Temporal certifies its infrastructure and leaves AI guardrails to partner integrations such as Tenuo, which runs inside Temporal workers. Temporal controls act only on Temporal workflows. Temporal maps no control to a named regulation.
Added through partner integrations
Temporal holds SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA for its infrastructure. Operators can pause an Activity and cancel or terminate a running workflow. Workflow Pause, which holds a whole workflow, is in pre-release. Temporal ships no AI-policy enforcement, decision explainability, or pre-deployment classification of its own.
Tenuo, a partner integration, checks authorization in a worker interceptor and blocks the Activity when the check fails. Each workflow keeps an append-only Event History, which Temporal calls an audit log and does not describe as tamper-evident. Temporal Cloud keeps control-plane audit logs for up to 30 days.
Block & escalate
Risk teams govern every agentic system without waiting on its developers, and every control they apply is guaranteed to be enforced. Risk teams choose from 1,718 controls drawn from 241 regulations and frameworks. 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 the work is orchestrating steps and the agents are not autonomous, and when your team is ready to select, integrate, and operate the memory, API, and governance layers around it — and to keep workflow code strictly deterministic.
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 and no determinism constraint on your code.
The Akka Agentic AI Platform builds, runs, governs and optimizes 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.
