Temporal vs Brahmalabs: we built our platform on Temporal — when you should too

The disclosure that is also the thesis

Brahmalabs runs on Temporal. Every run a customer starts on our platform is a Temporal workflow underneath. When a run pauses for approval, that is a Temporal signal. When a schedule fires, it rides the same durable substrate. We picked Temporal on purpose, and we would pick it again.

So this is not the usual head-to-head. Temporal and Brahmalabs sit at different layers: one is durable-execution infrastructure for developers, the other is an agent platform built on that infrastructure. The real question — the one you probably arrived with — is whether to build your agent platform on Temporal directly, the way we did, or to buy one where that work is already done. This essay is our attempt to answer that honestly, with the ledger of everything we had to build in between.

What durable execution actually buys you

Start with the endorsement, because it is earned. Temporal’s core promise is that a workflow’s progress survives anything: process crashes, deploys, node failures, multi-day waits. The mechanism is event sourcing — the server records every state transition, and workers reconstruct workflow state by replaying history. Out of the box you get crash recovery, automatic retries with exponential backoff, Signals, Queries, and Updates for interacting with a running workflow, durable timers, child workflows, and Schedules with pause, backfill, and overlap policies.

For agent workloads, this is the difference between a demo and a system. An agent run that waits three days for a human decision costs nothing while it waits and loses nothing if the fleet restarts underneath it. Temporal’s human-in-the-loop cookbook makes the point directly: because timers persist in the server database, a wait works identically whether it lasts five seconds or five months. In Brahmalabs, that property surfaces as runs that survive crashes and restarts — a workflow that started yesterday can finish today — and as pause, resume, and cancel implemented as signals rather than bespoke state machines we would otherwise have written badly.

The pedigree matters too. The server is MIT-licensed, with 21.4k GitHub stars and active releases as of July 2026. The founders built Uber’s Cadence and worked on AWS Simple Workflow before that. Temporal claims 2,500+ customers including Netflix, Stripe, and Coinbase, and it raised a $300M Series D at a $5B valuation in February 2026, positioned explicitly around agentic AI. This is durable infrastructure in both senses of the word. If you build on it, you are building on the right thing.

The ledger: what raw Temporal does not give an agent platform

Temporal is candid about where its layer ends. Its April 2026 positioning post describes Temporal as an enterprise agentic control plane, and states in the same breath that enterprises still provide the agent logic and prompts, tool integrations, approval policies, and context preparation themselves — and that “human-in-the-loop workflows remain organizationally specific implementations.” That sentence is the honest boundary of the product. Everything below is what we had to build above it. The Temporal column reflects their documentation as of July 2026.

Three rows deserve expansion, because they are where teams most underestimate the work.

”Sandbox” means two different things here

Temporal has a sandbox concept, and it is worth being precise, because it is not the same layer as ours. In Temporal’s world, sandboxing is about workflow determinism: workflow code must replay identically against recorded history, and the runtime guards against non-deterministic calls sneaking in. Separately, their OpenAI Agents SDK integration — public preview in July 2025, generally available for Python in March 2026 — wraps agent loops in workflows so that LLM calls and tool calls become durable, retryable Activities. Both are real and both are useful. Neither is container isolation for what the agent actually executes. When an agent runs shell commands, browses the web, or executes generated code, the blast radius is bounded by the container and its network policy — CPU, memory, and timeout ceilings, plus an egress allowlist with per-run capture of what actually left. That layer does not exist in Temporal because it is not Temporal’s job. It became ours.

An approval is a signal; an approval policy is a product

Temporal gives you exactly the right primitive for human-in-the-loop: a workflow that blocks on a Signal, durably, indefinitely, for free. What it deliberately does not give you — their words: “organizationally specific implementations” — is everything a compliance team means by “approval”: who is allowed to approve, what happens when two of three approvers agree and the third rejects, what a four-hour SLA breach escalates to, what form the reviewer fills in, and where all of it is recorded. We built N-of-M consensus, rejection policies, SLA timeouts, escalation chains, and dynamic approval forms on top of that one Signal primitive, with an inbox where approvals arrive and runs that park durably until decided. The primitive took a week to adopt. The policy layer took far longer, and it is the part your auditors will actually ask about.

Event history is for debugging; an audit trail is for auditors

Temporal Cloud retains closed-workflow history for a configurable 1–90 days per namespace. That is a debugging window, not a compliance record. An agent platform needs an application-level audit log that outlives the run: we keep an append-only log across eight event categories — auth, config, run, HITL, integration, key, tenant, guardrail — with tier-based retention, queryable and exportable, so auditors get URLs rather than zip files. Guardrail events are additionally hash-chained. If you build on Temporal directly, plan to export and structure this yourself; the event history alone will not satisfy a SOC 2 auditor eighteen months later.

Two honest notes in the other direction. Our integrations catalog is young and depth varies by provider — Zapier and n8n are far ahead on raw breadth, and MCP closes only some of that gap. And on permissions, Temporal Cloud offers five account-level roles plus SCIM (on Enterprise, or as a $500/month add-on on Business); Brahmalabs ships three fixed roles — admin, member, viewer — enforced server-side, with no custom roles and no SCIM today.

The economics of building it yourself

Building on Temporal has three cost lines: the Temporal bill, the infrastructure around it, and the team. Only the first one is small.

As of July 2026, Temporal Cloud has four plans. Essentials is the greater of $100/month or 5% of usage and includes 1M Actions; Business is the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage with 2.5M Actions and SAML SSO; Enterprise and Mission Critical are annual contracts with 10M Actions and 24/7 support. Overage is volume-tiered from $50 per million Actions for the first 5M, stepping down to $25 per million at 100–200M. Storage runs $0.042 per GB-hour active and $0.00105 per GB-hour retained, and high-availability namespaces double both Action and storage billing. There is no perpetual free Cloud tier — new customers get $1,000 in credits, or $6,000 through the startup program.

Note the trajectory: in the January 2025 restructure (existing-customer migrations began that February), the first-5M Action rate doubled from $25 to $50 per million and retained-storage rates rose 2.5x, partially offset by volume discounts that now start at 5M Actions instead of 300M. Small and mid-size workloads got materially more expensive; even the deepest published volume tier — $25 per million at 100–200M Actions — only returns to the old entry rate, and above 200M it is contact-sales.

Actions add up faster for agents than for classic backend workflows. An Action is starting a workflow, scheduling or completing an Activity, recording a heartbeat, firing a timer, or sending a Signal. An agent run is Action-dense by construction: every tool call is an Activity (scheduled and completed), every retry repeats it, every approval is a Signal, every SLA is a timer. A run with a few dozen tool calls can burn a hundred Actions before it finishes. This is fair pricing for what the server does — but model it against your run shapes before assuming the $100 floor is your bill.

Self-hosting trades that bill for operations. The license costs nothing, but production Temporal means four services plus a persistence database, with Elasticsearch recommended for anything beyond light use. One third-party guide estimates realistic self-hosted infrastructure at $2,500–$4,500 per month plus a quarter to a full FTE of ongoing ops. A practitioner write-up describes multi-day debugging of cryptic networking issues during setup, though smooth upgrades afterward.

None of that is the expensive part. The expensive part is the ledger in the previous section. Each row is a subsystem with its own failure modes, security review, and maintenance tail — the approval-policy engine, the container sandbox and egress layer, the vault, the integrations catalog, the audit store, the metering. Budget it as a platform team owning it for years, not a project team shipping it in a quarter. And running on Temporal adds its own recurring tax: workflow code must stay deterministic across deploys, so changing in-flight workflows means the Patched API or Worker Versioning — a discipline practitioners describe as the hardest problem in Temporal. One team that adopted it for a modest queue-replacement use case concluded that with a time machine they would not do it again — not because Temporal failed, but because its weight is calibrated for high-stakes workloads. Agent platforms are exactly such a workload, which is why we absorbed that weight so our customers do not have to.

For the buy column: Brahmalabs is $0 on Free (1,000 credits, 5 workflows, 3 agents), $299/month on Pro (30,000 credits, SSO, multi-party approval, custom sandbox images, 90-day audit retention), and custom on Enterprise (dedicated compute, region choice, VPC peering, 1-year audit retention). Credits meter runs and sandbox-minutes — no per-seat fees, which Temporal Cloud also avoids. You bring your own model keys; we never mark up inference, and the platform fee is flat per 1k tokens.

Build on Temporal directly when

Written as we would advise a friend who will find out if we lied.

• The orchestration layer is your product. If your approval semantics, tenancy model, or runtime constraints are genuinely bespoke — if the workflow engine is where you differentiate — no platform’s abstractions will fit without friction. Own the layer. Use our ledger above as a first draft of your backlog.
• You already operate a Temporal estate. If you have workers in production, versioning discipline, and on-call familiarity, the marginal cost of agent workflows is one more workflow type. Temporal meets you there with the OpenAI Agents SDK integration and a Google ADK integration, plus Workflow Streams for durable LLM token streaming.
• Self-hosting is a hard requirement. We cannot meet it: Brahmalabs is a managed platform, and on-prem/VPC deployment is an Enterprise engagement, not a downloadable core. Temporal’s server is MIT-licensed — unrestricted commercial self-hosting, no fair-code strings. If your data cannot leave your network, Temporal OSS is the honest answer and we will say so to your face.
• You want no vendor between you and your runtime. Even on Temporal Cloud, you run your own workers — your code, in eight languages, on your compute, with the MIT server as an exit if Cloud stops suiting you. A platform like ours is, by definition, a vendor in that path.
• Procurement needs certified compliance now. Temporal Cloud’s security page states SOC 2 Type II certification plus GDPR and HIPAA compliance. Our SOC 2 Type II is in progress, not complete. If a certified substrate is this quarter’s gate, that difference is real.

Buy a platform when

• You need the approval product, not the approval primitive. Quorum rules, SLA escalation, dynamic forms, and a reviewer inbox on day one — instead of a Signals codebase your team maintains forever.
• Your security review has a checklist. Container isolation per agent step, egress allowlists with per-run capture of actual outbound domains, vaulted credentials agents never see, and an exportable audit trail are answers you can give in the first meeting rather than the fourth quarter.
• Non-engineers must read and change workflows. The visual builder and the DSL are the same validated artifact, so an operations lead can follow what an engineer built.
• You cannot staff the platform team. The ledger is years of engineering. If agents are meant to serve your business rather than be your business, that is years spent off-mission.
• You want agent-native cost visibility. Per-run cost estimates (labeled as estimates — we do not pretend to exact metering), spend ceilings per workflow, and credit metering, rather than translating Temporal Actions into LLM spend yourself.

And what buying Brahmalabs means accepting, stated plainly: we are a young product in early access, with no public case studies yet, SOC 2 Type II in progress, no public status page, and docs behind the dashboard login. There is no CLI, git-sync, or Terraform provider yet — workflows are versioned in-platform. The integration catalog is hundreds of providers, not thousands. Roles are three and fixed. If any of those are disqualifying, they should be — come back in a few quarters or build on Temporal now.

Where this leaves you

If you are a platform engineer at a company with real Temporal expertise and genuinely bespoke requirements, build. You are Temporal’s ideal customer, the foundation is sound, and the ledger above tells you what you are signing up for. If self-hosting is non-negotiable, build — that door is closed with us today. If you already run Temporal in production, extend it before you buy anything; your marginal cost is low and their agent tooling is maturing fast.

If instead you need agents in production this year with approvals your compliance team accepts, sandboxing your security team accepts, and an audit trail your auditors accept — and you do not want to fund a platform team to get there — that is the product we built, on the substrate this essay just spent three thousand words endorsing. Brahmalabs is in early access; the ledger above is what is already running.