Tidebase vs Temporal: do you need durable execution for an AI agent?
The short answer: Temporal asks you to move execution into its worker model; Tidebase asks you to wrap functions you already have. Different adoption cost for a smaller guarantee. If you’re already all-in on Temporal, you don’t need Tidebase.
Tidebase is an open-source checkpoint layer for AI agents: wrap your steps, and failed runs resume from the last safe point — in your own Postgres, without moving execution into a new runtime.
The structural difference
Temporal owns durable execution. Your workflow code runs inside Temporal workers against the Temporal server (or Temporal Cloud). In exchange for adopting its programming model — deterministic workflow functions, activities, task queues, its deployment topology — you get true durable execution: a dead worker’s workflow continues on another worker automatically.
Tidebase does not execute your code. Your app, worker, or job process keeps calling your LLMs, tools, and APIs directly. The SDK wraps your workflow function; a Postgres-backed server stores checkpoints, state, events, and gates around it. Since v0.5 Tidebase also owns re-invocation when you want it to: durable queues (pull workers or signed push webhooks), cron schedules, and a reconciler that requeues runs whose worker died — completed steps replay from checkpoints, so retries never re-pay for finished work.
Side by side
| Tidebase | Temporal | |
|---|---|---|
| Executes your code | No — external checkpoint coordination | Yes — worker runtime |
| Guarantee | Completed steps never repeat on re-invocation | Workflow continues automatically after worker death |
| Adoption cost | Wrap existing functions in run.step() | Restructure into deterministic workflows + activities; run workers |
| Infrastructure | Your app + one server + Postgres | Temporal cluster (or Cloud) + workers |
| Determinism constraints on your code | None | Workflow code must be deterministic |
| Live run state for product UIs | Built in (run.state, SSE) | Build yourself (queries/signals) |
| Human approval gates | Built in, durable, exactly-once | Build with signals |
| Agent-specific features (fanout/join of subagents, state versioning/forking, token-cost ledger) | Built in | Build yourself on primitives |
| Maturity | Self-hosted alpha, opt-in auth | Battle-tested at large scale, production-grade |
Choose Temporal if
- You need true automatic continuation — no part of your stack can be responsible for re-invoking work.
- You have long-lived, complex orchestrations (days/weeks, timers, sagas) beyond agent pipelines.
- You need production-grade multi-tenancy, auth, and operational tooling today.
Choose Tidebase if
- You have an existing app or worker and want crash-safe resume without restructuring it around a workflow engine.
- Your pain is agent-shaped: “is it safe to rerun?”, progress streaming to a product UI, human approval gates, subagent fanout, per-run token costs.
- You want everything in your own Postgres, self-hosted, Apache-2.0.
Repo: https://github.com/BlueprintLabIO/tidebase · See also: Tidebase vs Inngest · Tidebase vs DBOS and Restate