Temporal is a durable-execution engine: workflows, schedules and signals, with state kept by the platform so a run survives crashes and long waits. Temporal markets it for AI work directly: "Guarantee all executions of all processes run to completion successfully in spite of failures" and "Easily facilitate human-in-the-loop interactions like validating LLM results or approving agent decisions" (https://temporal.io/solutions/ai).
Vocion is enterprise-grade AI you own: an open source platform with apps out
of the box, running in your AWS account or ours. It needs durable execution
too, and Vocion 5.x gets it without Temporal. Earlier versions ran
schedules on Temporal; that was removed, and every flow, schedule and
background job now runs on DBOS inside the app process, in a durable schema
of the app's own Postgres (docs/deployment/v0.6.0-off-temporal.md). There
is no workflow server, worker container or second database to run.
So this is a comparison of two ways to get agents doing durable work: an
engine you build on, or a platform that has one inside. Checked against
2026-10-08, against vocion-core v5.2.0.
When to build directly on Temporal
When you already run Temporal in production, your team writes the workflows in code, and the people watching the runs are engineers. Temporal's durability, retries and tooling are mature and proven at a scale Vocion has not published equivalents for. It also gives you Temporal Cloud if you want the engine run for you (https://temporal.io/pricing). If what you need is a general-purpose engine for many kinds of work, not only AI, Temporal is the stronger primitive.
What you build on Temporal alone
Temporal has no concept of an agent, a prompt or a model. A workflow is a function, and what runs inside it is up to you. On Temporal alone you build: the agent definitions and prompts, connectors to your systems, the apps people use, a screen where a non-engineer approves a paused run, cost per run, and a link from an output back to the configuration that produced it.
Vocion ships those: Workforce, Assistants, Software Factory and GTM apps; 23
source connectors in core (libs/sources/registry.ts); approve and ask
workflow steps that pause in a shared review queue (docs/entities/workflow.md);
per-agent budgets that refuse a run over its hard cap
(services/BudgetService.ts); and a workspace_sha stamped on every tool
call (README.md).
Side by side
| Temporal | Vocion | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A durable-execution engine | A platform with apps, durable runs built in |
| Durable runs | Core product, proven at scale | DBOS in the app's own Postgres; a paused workflow waits through restarts and deploys, up to 90 days (services/workflows/durableWorkflowRun.ts) |
| Extra infrastructure | A Temporal cluster, or Temporal Cloud | None beyond Postgres |
| A person's decision | A Signal delivers it into a running workflow (message passing) | A decision in the review queue resumes the paused run |
| Schedules | First-party schedules | Five-field UTC cron on durable schedules (docs/entities/automation.md) |
| Missed schedules | A configurable catchup window, one year by default (schedules) | Not backfilled: a missed tick is skipped and the next one fires (v0.6.0-off-temporal.md) |
| Agents, prompts, apps | You build them | Included |
| Where it runs | Self-hosted or Temporal Cloud | Your AWS account, Vocion Cloud, or self-hosted with Postgres 16 |
| License | MIT (LICENSE) | MPL-2.0, with a commercial license available |
Which to pick
Build on Temporal if you have an engineering team, an existing cluster, and work that goes well beyond AI agents. Pick Vocion if you want agents doing real work across the company this week, with durable runs, apps and a record included, in a deployment you own, and one database to look after instead of two systems.
Related
- Compare approaches: closed SaaS AI, building on a framework, or Vocion.
- Workflows: the
approveandasksteps. - Automations: schedules and event triggers.
- Vocion vs. LangGraph: the same question for an agent library.