Comparison
Croft vs Temporal.io
Both promise a run that survives anything. Temporal gives your engineers the machinery to build that. Croft gives your team the finished thing.
The short answer
Temporal is the reference implementation of durable execution. Your engineers write workflow and activity functions in Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, .NET, PHP or Ruby; you deploy a fleet of workers to execute them; and either you operate a Temporal cluster or you buy Temporal Cloud. In exchange you get event-sourced, replayable, essentially unbreakable orchestration of your own services. For mission-critical distributed transactions inside a real engineering organisation, nothing else is in the same class.
Croft makes the same durability promise about a much smaller problem, and takes the engineering out of it. There is no SDK, no worker fleet and no cluster: an agent writes the workflow, we run it, and the connectors and credentials come with it. It is not a general-purpose framework for orchestrating your production services, and it does not pretend to be.
Pick Temporal when the thing being orchestrated is your own software and you have engineers to do it. Pick Croft when the thing being orchestrated is your team's week and you do not.
What Temporal is
Temporal is an open-source durable execution platform: a server that persists workflow history as events, and SDKs in seven languages that let application code be interrupted, moved and resumed without losing its place.
Durable execution for engineering teams. This page is our reading of Temporal's own published material as of — we deliberately quote no prices of theirs, because a stale price is worse than none. Check their site for the current details.
Croft and Temporal, side by side
| Croft | Temporal | |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the workflow | You describe the problem in your own words. An agent writes it through MCP, and it is live in the same conversation. | Your engineers, in Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, .NET, PHP or Ruby, using the Temporal SDK. |
| What a workflow actually is | TypeScript, compiled to WASM, run in a sandbox with no ambient network and no ambient credentials. | Workflow and activity functions in your own codebase, executed by worker processes you deploy. |
| Where the connections live | Held by Croft, scoped to one workspace, granted by a human and revocable in one click. Never inside workflow code. | Yours to manage. Temporal has no concept of a third-party connection — every API key is your application's problem. |
| When a run is interrupted | It carries on. Runs are checkpointed and replayable, and survive deploys, crashes and losing the machine underneath them. | Best in class. Event-sourced and replayable, with deterministic replay, timers and signals that survive anything. |
| What you operate | Nothing. No instance, no workers, no queue, no upgrade window. | A Temporal cluster and your worker fleet, or Temporal Cloud and your worker fleet. The workers are always yours. |
| What you are billed on | A flat price per workspace, metered only on runs per week. People, workspaces and workflows are unlimited on every plan. | Temporal Cloud meters actions, storage and retention. Self-hosting is Apache-2.0 and costs you a cluster plus the people who run it. |
| What an agent can do | Everything. Every capability is an MCP tool before it is a screen, so Claude can build, run, inspect and fix workflows directly. | Nothing built in. An agent would have to write code into your repository and wait for your deploy pipeline like everyone else. |
| Getting your work back out | Your workflow TypeScript, your tables and your files export at any time. | It is your repository already. |
The four differences that matter
The durability is the same promise; the price of admission is not
Croft runs on the BEAM, and a workflow scheduled for Sunday runs on Sunday regardless of what broke on Thursday — checkpointed, replayable, surviving deploys and losing the machine underneath it. What you do not do to get that is choose an SDK, model activities, reason about determinism, size a worker fleet, or stand up a cluster. There is no platform team on the far side of this.
Connectors and credentials are the product, not an exercise
Temporal orchestrates whatever you write, which means every integration — the OAuth dance, the refresh token, the rate limit, the retry policy, where the secret lives — is code your team writes and owns. Croft ships managed connectors whose credentials are held centrally, scoped to a workspace, granted by a human and revocable in one click, and workflow code never sees a secret at all.
The author is an agent, not a hiring plan
A Temporal workflow is engineering work: a ticket, a branch, a review, a deploy. A Croft workflow is a sentence. The agent writes the TypeScript, it is live in the same conversation, and changing it later is another sentence. For the ordinary recurring work of a team — the reports, the chases, the reconciliations — that difference decides whether it gets automated at all.
Someone non-technical can see what ran
Temporal's Web UI is excellent and it is for engineers: workflow histories, event types, task queues. Croft's canvas is for the person whose process this is — the graph, each run step by step, what it touched, and a kill switch on every connection. Visibility that requires an engineer to interpret is not visibility for the team the workflow belongs to.
Which one you want
Use Temporal when
- — You are orchestrating your own production services, not your team's admin.
- — You need multi-language SDKs, custom saga semantics, or workflows running for months at high volume.
- — The code and the data have to stay inside your own VPC.
- — You have engineers who will own the worker fleet, and that is a reasonable use of them.
Use Croft when
- ✓ The work you want made durable is business process, not distributed systems.
- ✓ You do not have — and do not want — a platform team.
- ✓ You want the connectors, the credential handling and the schedules to come in the box.
- ✓ You want an agent to write and maintain the workflow, and a non-engineer to be able to read it.
Common questions
Is Croft built on Temporal?
No. Croft's runtime is Elixir on the BEAM, with runs checkpointed and replayable, and workflow code compiled to WASM and run in a sandbox with no ambient network or credentials. The durability guarantee is similar in spirit; the implementation is our own and nothing about it is exposed to you.
Can Croft replace Temporal?
For orchestrating your own microservices at scale, no — use Temporal. For the recurring operational work that lands on a team every week, Croft gives you the same "it will still run in a year" property without an SDK, a worker fleet or a cluster.
Do I write code in Croft the way I do in Temporal?
You can read it, export it, and ask the agent to change it, but you are not expected to write it. Croft workflows are TypeScript compiled to WASM, authored by an agent over MCP. Temporal's model is the opposite by design: the code is yours, in your repository, executed by workers you deploy.
How does the pricing compare?
Temporal Cloud meters actions and storage on top of whatever your worker fleet costs to run; self-hosting swaps that for a cluster and the people who operate it. Croft is a flat price per workspace metered on runs per week, with no infrastructure on your side at all.
The fastest way to tell the difference
Say the thing your team keeps having to do, in your own words. An agent writes the workflow, it runs this week, and you have something to compare against Temporal rather than a table to read. The free plan needs no card.