head to head · open source
Temporal vs dbos-transact-golang
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars, 1,914 forks, 956 open issues and last shipped today. dbos-transact-golang has 836 stars, 73 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Temporal leads on adoption by 2,673% (23,180 vs 836 stars). Temporal is written in Go under MIT; dbos-transact-golang is written in Go under MIT. Temporal has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, dbos-transact-golang 9%. Temporal was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (durable-execution, golang, workflow-automation), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | dbos-transact-golang | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 836 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 73 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Temporal if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick dbos-transact-golang if
- You want the dbos-transact-golang feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and dbos-transact-golang fits your workflow better
About Temporal
Temporal is a durable execution platform for building resilient applications with workflows. It lives in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, specifically within orchestration and scheduling. The server executes units of application logic called Workflows and automatically handles intermittent failures by retrying failed operations. Temporal originated as a fork of Uber's Cadence and is developed by Temporal Technologies, a startup formed by the creators of Cadence.
read the full Temporal overview →
About dbos-transact-golang
DBOS Transact for Go is an MIT licensed Go library that adds durable, Postgres backed workflow orchestration to ordinary Go programs, aimed at developers who need reliable failure recovery without operating a separate orchestrator or task queue.
read the full dbos-transact-golang overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Temporal or dbos-transact-golang more popular?
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars and dbos-transact-golang has 836. Temporal has the larger community by that measure.
Are Temporal and dbos-transact-golang free?
Both are open source. Temporal is licensed under MIT and dbos-transact-golang under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Temporal and dbos-transact-golang?
Temporal is written in Go and dbos-transact-golang in Go. 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 dbos-transact-golang?
Choose Temporal if you want the larger community (23,180 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose dbos-transact-golang if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.