Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Appian vs Temporal comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Appian
Ranking in Process Automation
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (7th), Rapid Application Development Software (5th), Low-Code Development Platforms (4th), Process Mining (6th)
Temporal
Ranking in Process Automation
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Srimanta Pandit - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible, improves operational efficiency, and reduces the time taken to complete processes
The solution’s turnaround time for development is better compared to other tools. The solution enables fast development. The traceability of the processor is good. There is much more governance and regulations on the processers. The tool reduces the time of the processes by 30% to 40%. The solution’s low-code aspect has greatly impacted the development and deployment speed. One of the major reasons we are using the product is that we can reuse the modules. The developers can reuse all the modules. It enables us to make subsequent developments in less time. The prebuilt modules can be deployed within two to three weeks. The tool is very flexible. Compared to other platforms, the Appian product team was agile in quickly customizing things for us.
AbhishekDash - PeerSpot reviewer
Orchestrates infrastructure tasks like deployment, deletion, and management
Temporal focus on developers rather than business users. In contrast to older workflow orchestration engines like Camunda, which are more business-oriented and strongly emphasize UI and workflow authoring, Temporal is geared toward developers. It provides extensive capabilities for building complex workflows. A standout feature of Temporal is its handling of long-running workflows, a significant advantage over many other solutions. Temporal excels in managing distributed transactions and application state durability, especially in microservice environments where transactions might fail due to network issues. Temporal simplifies these challenges by managing retries, fail-safes, and circuit breakers. As a result, developers don't need to implement these features manually; Temporal handles them implicitly, though it also allows for tuning based on specific needs.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The low code functionality and being able to get applications faster to customers or to the market are valuable."
"There is no need to worry about vulnerabilities in the system, because Appian built a secure system​."
"The product's most valuable feature is the low code aspect of development. We can develop an end-to-end VPN solution using a single platform."
"SAIL (Self-Assembling Interface Layer), a scripting language provided by Appian. It is the equivalent of JS and CSS. It allows creation of complex UIs which are also responsive. With SAIL, we have a single language for both the UI logic and its appearance. UI components can be built as reusable components and used in multiple UI interfaces."
"Technical support is helpful."
"It has created executable requirements and speeds up the SDLC process greatly."
"It is easy for me to define the process and create configurable workflows."
"The most valuable features are the low coding and low code data."
"The most valuable thing about Temporal is that we can create multiple and child workflows. We can segregate work as we want, which is good for work organization. It's also easy to maintain. We're trying to generate and fill PDF forms with custom data, including digital signatures. We call AWS and do all activities through Temporal, like calling and saving data in buckets. We do this because we have a lot of load, with multiple users requesting data. We have two types of users: admin and customer. The admin creates forms, and employees or customers fill them out. When admin gets a form, it's stored in Temporal."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to manage and automate workflows without manual intervention efficiently."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It's easy to get started and user-friendly."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to fix things quickly."
"The solution's most valuable features include its ability to simplify the management of complex workflows, improve system resilience and fault tolerance, and reduce the need for extensive boilerplate code."
"What I like best about the tool is that it's easy to install, especially since it uses JavaScript. It's also easy to set up with Docker, and the documentation is easy to understand."
"Temporal focus on developers rather than business users."
 

Cons

"The performance is pretty good, but the distortions need to be optimized in order for it to work well."
"Even though the company has made great improvements in online documentation, featuring rich material which includes case studies of real-life use cases, the material could definitely be better in quality and coverage of use cases."
"I would like to see more features for enterprises. They would also benefit from adding documentation and training on their site."
"Lacks business rules management as part of the solution."
"Appian could improve their customer-facing initiatives."
"Appian could be improved by making it a strict, no-code platform with free-built process packs."
"We would like to see more reduced latency. We would like to make sure that the scale-out factor will be much more as workloads come in."
"It has it's own built-in UI components and doesn't provide much flexibility to customize or extend those components."
"Temporal lacks many resources, like YouTube videos, which users can use to learn or refer to if they get stuck with the solution."
"Temporal could be improved by making it more user-friendly for beginners and non-technical staff, ensuring easier integration and usability across different use cases."
"Temporal's debugging is a bit complex."
"While the tool can be a bit daunting initially, especially if you're not used to async programming models, it's generally a pleasure. There's always room for improvement, though. I've noticed some limitations with the .NET SDK regarding dynamic workflows, but this might have been improved in recent versions. Overall, I think Temporal could be more open about implementing features in a more—.NET-friendly way, especially in how you add workers and clients."
"Temporal doesn't have built-in data storage to store the state of the ongoing execution."
"One area where I think Temporal could improve is its dashboard, particularly in event tracking. Currently, the dashboard doesn't show a time-based view of events, meaning it doesn't display when an event started or went through the retry process. If this feature could be added in a future release, it would significantly enhance monitoring capabilities. Other than that, Temporal's overall performance is quite impressive, and we're confident we can migrate to the Temporal workflow."
"There are areas where Temporal could improve. For instance, calling multiple microservices with Temporal introduces latency due to workflow registration and analytics overhead."
"Sometimes it scales kind of badly, but it depends on the process of our products."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an enterprise tool and can be used by enterprise only. So it's a very expensive tool."
"The price is high."
"The tool is quite costly."
"I'm sure it is cost-effective, but right now, we're just toying around with it. So, I don't have any hard numbers."
"The solution offers a monthly subscription model. That's what we use. I recall it being about $90 a month. They do have different tiers."
"The price of the solution is reasonable and is paid annually. The price of the solution depends on how many users use the solution. It can range from $50,000 to $200,000. For example, for 20,000 users the price can be approximately $200,000."
"The licensing will be on a monthly basis. We are estimating that cost to be around $2000 to maybe $3,000 per month. We don't foresee any costs above that."
"If you're doing an enterprise-wide digital transformation, Appian is worthwhile, but not for just one or two use cases because the license costs are higher."
"It is worth the price."
"Temporal is a free, open-source tool."
"Temporal is open-source and free to use, which is great. We didn't have to pay for any premium features."
"The tool is open source under the MIT license, so there are no hidden fees. You can freely use everything on their GitHub and Docker images."
"The savings weren't as big as we initially expected, but they were pretty great from a developer's perspective."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Process Automation solutions are best for your needs.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
28%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
19%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Appian or Camunda Platform?
Appian is fast when building simple to medium solutions. This solution offers simple drag-and-drop functionality with easy plug-and-play options. The initial setup was seamless and very easy to imp...
Is Appian a suitable solution for beginners who have no additional preparation?
Appian is actually pretty big on educating its users, including with courses that reward you with certifications. There is a whole section on their company’s website where you can check out the edu...
Is it easy to set up Appian or did you have to resort to professional help?
We had some issues when we were setting up Appian. It was quite surprising, since this is a low-code tool which, in its essence, means it is meant for business users and inexperienced beginners. So...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Temporal?
Temporal OSS is expensive in infrastructure, but it brings back the reliability that companies need.
What needs improvement with Temporal?
The actual user interface is still in its early stages. It’s very basic. Users don’t really have a complex permission model yet. Users don’t really have ways to automate things like, for example, p...
What is your primary use case for Temporal?
We [my company] use it to run a large workload. We have a set of security scans we want to perform, and we distribute them over a full day, that’s over 24 hours. We use it to orchestrate all the st...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Appian BPM, Appian AnyWhere, Appian Enterprise BPMS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hansard Global plc, Punch Taverns, Pirelli, Crawford & Company, EDP Renewables, Queensland Government Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning (, Bank of Tennessee
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Appian vs. Temporal and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.