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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

"This is the most complete solution of its kind."
"Technical support has been amazing overall."
"Call Web Service Smart Service - Web service integrations with other systems are super simple and fast to create, supported by low code menus."
"Low code development: Code can be developed pretty quickly which leads to less turnaround time for automation of business processes."
"The process models provide self-documenting systems."
"In terms of interface, it's very good. In terms of infrastructure, it's amazing and already using multiple tools behind the scenes. It's a low-code platform, so it's very easy to implement."
"Form building capabilities and well thought out process modelling are key points to this product."
"It is easy for me to define the process and create configurable workflows."
"What I like best about Temporal is its durable execution, which means you don't need to write many boilerplate code for critical pieces, especially for retries. It also has great observability and a nice dashboard to see issues without digging into logs. The interface for viewing activities is excellent, with good tracing that shows how long activities took and what ran, making it almost perfect for debugging."
"The tool is easy for a beginner to learn. The documentation covers activities, workflows, workers, servers, and more. While more examples could be beneficial, the existing resources are good enough to help you get started. There are also YouTube videos available that can provide additional context. The Slack community for Temporal is very active and helpful, similar to Stack Overflow, where you can find answers to a wide range of questions from basic to advanced levels. If you have a unique question, the community is responsive and provides knowledgeable support."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It is very useful for long-running workflows."
"When some jobs take a lot of time and fail midway, the solution’s retry feature automatically causes them to retry."
"It's easy to get started and user-friendly."
"Temporal focus on developers rather than business users."
"Temporal provides visibility into workflow progress and analytics and supports scheduled tasks with customizable settings, making it very convenient."
 

Cons

"A point of improvement would be the SAIL forms. The built-in tool used to generate forms does not have debugging support (to view local variables as they change on live preview, and step-by-step valuation) which is a big drawback for form development. Moreover, the script language used to build SAIL forms does not support inheritance or lambda expressions (functions as arguments of other functions), which makes the code base more verbose."
"The reporting is not as good as in similar products. They could also improve the dashboards."
"There should be more flexibility for the developers to choose the look and feel of the UI. They should have a better ability to design their widgets and customize them with different colors, shapes, and sizes. That is a limitation that could be improved upon."
"It has it's own built-in UI components and doesn't provide much flexibility to customize or extend those components."
"What could be improved is more on the front end perspective, like the user interface and the mobile application aspect."
"Occasionally, certain pre-made modules may not be necessary and customers may desire greater customization options. Instead of being limited to pre-designed features, they may prefer a more flexible version that allows for greater customization."
"It would be useful if they could create an academy or forum in the future to help active users answer questions they have about the solution."
"The solution could improve by being more responsive when dealing with large quantities of data. Additionally, they can make the decision or rules engine better. It cannot handle too many rules or too many decisions at once."
"Sometimes it scales kind of badly, but it depends on the process of our products."
"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."
"I don't like the limitations on data flow, particularly the difficulty of passing large amounts of data between different activities."
"There are areas where Temporal could improve. For instance, calling multiple microservices with Temporal introduces latency due to workflow registration and analytics overhead."
"Retro compatibility needs improvement. Sometimes, when we make new changes to a workflow, it fails if it is not configured properly due to compatibility issues."
"Temporal's debugging is a bit complex."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We will have to have a dialogue or negotiate a price for future use. To start with, it is a reasonable price. As we go ahead, we will have to make sure the costs are inline with our expectations as we grow our user base and workloads."
"BPM done right is a huge value proposition for almost any company, and with Appian's low code rapid development model, the ROI can be huge, while the break-even point should be accelerated tremendously."
"The tool is quite costly."
"The cost is calculated on a per-user basis. It might be expensive for small and mid-sized enterprises."
"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."
"When it comes to pricing, it's definitely not affordable. However, it really depends on the requirements that you're seeking from the solution."
"Licensing of Appian is less expensive when compared to other BPMs in the market."
"Product pricing compared to some of the earlier vendors, like IBM, CA, and Oracle, is quite well-priced. Although, we do feel that as we increase the number of users and the workload increases, we will have to spend more."
"It is worth the price."
"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."
"Temporal is open-source and free to use, which is great. We didn't have to pay for any premium features."
"Temporal is a free, open-source tool."
"The savings weren't as big as we initially expected, but they were pretty great from a developer's perspective."
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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.
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