head to head · open source
Temporal vs sidequest
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars, 1,914 forks, 956 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sidequest has 1,015 stars, 25 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. Temporal leads on adoption by 2,184% (23,180 vs 1,015 stars). Temporal is written in Go under MIT; sidequest is written in TypeScript under LGPL-3.0. Temporal has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, sidequest 2%. 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 | ★ 23K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | MIT | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 25 |
| 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 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 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 sidequest
Sidequest is a Redis free background job processor for Node.js that persists jobs in the PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB database an application already runs, aimed at teams that need durable, distributed queue processing without operating Redis.
read the full sidequest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Temporal or sidequest more popular?
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars and sidequest has 1,015. 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 (23,180 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose sidequest if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.