head to head · open source
Temporal vs sidequest
Temporal has 24,173 GitHub stars, 2,072 forks, 956 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sidequest has 1,021 stars, 31 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. Temporal leads on adoption by 2,268% (24,173 vs 1,021 stars). Temporal is written in Go under MIT; sidequest is written in TypeScript under LGPL-3.0. Temporal has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, sidequest 3%. Temporal was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Temporal | sidequest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 24K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | MIT | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.1K | ⑂ 31 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Temporal if
- You weight community size — 24K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick sidequest if
- You want the sidequest feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and sidequest fits your workflow better
About Temporal
Temporal—durable execution platform Introduction • Getting Started • Contributing • Temporal Docs • Temporal 101 Introduction Temporal is a durable execution platform that enables developers to build scalable applications without sacrificing productivity or reliability. The Temporal server executes units of application logic called Workflows in a resilient manner that automatically handles intermittent failures, and retries failed operations. Temporal is a mature technology that originated as a fork of Uber's Cadence. It is developed by Temporal Technologies, a startup by the creators of…
read the full Temporal overview →
About sidequest
Sidequest Sidequest is a Redis free background job processor for Node.js . It persists jobs in the database you already run (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB), so you get durable, distributed background processing without standing up Redis. It is a production grade BullMQ and pg boss alternative, with a built in web dashboard. At a glance Runtime: Node.js ( = 22.6.0). Does not run on Bun yet. Storage: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB. Jobs are durable and persisted in your database , not in memory. SQLite is recommended for local development and tests. Distribution: runs across multiple nodes against…
read the full sidequest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Temporal or sidequest more popular?
Temporal has 24,173 GitHub stars and sidequest has 1,021. Temporal has the larger community by that measure.
Are Temporal and sidequest free?
Both are open source. Temporal is licensed under MIT and sidequest under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Temporal and sidequest?
Temporal is written in Go and sidequest in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Temporal or sidequest?
Choose Temporal if you want the larger community (24,173 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose sidequest if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.