head to head · open source
Temporal vs dtm
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars, 1,914 forks, 956 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dtm has 10,919 stars, 997 forks, 87 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Temporal leads on adoption by 112% (23,180 vs 10,919 stars). Temporal is written in Go under MIT; dtm is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. Temporal has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, dtm 9%. Temporal was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (golang), 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 | dtm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 11K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-01-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 997 |
| 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 dtm if
- You want the dtm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and dtm 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 dtm
DTM is a distributed transaction framework that provides cross service eventual data consistency for microservices, with saga, TCC, XA, 2 phase message, outbox, and workflow patterns plus SDKs for Go, Java, PHP, C , Python, and Node.js.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Temporal or dtm more popular?
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars and dtm has 10,919. Temporal has the larger community by that measure.
Are Temporal and dtm free?
Both are open source. Temporal is licensed under MIT and dtm under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Temporal and dtm?
Temporal is written in Go and dtm 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 dtm?
Choose Temporal if you want the larger community (23,180 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose dtm if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.