head to head · open source
Temporal vs workflow-core
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars, 1,914 forks, 956 open issues and last shipped today. workflow-core has 5,926 stars, 1,262 forks, 133 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Temporal leads on adoption by 291% (23,180 vs 5,926 stars). Temporal is written in Go under MIT; workflow-core is written in C# under MIT. Temporal has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, workflow-core 21%. 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 | workflow-core | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 workflow-core if
- You want the workflow-core feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and workflow-core 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 workflow-core
Workflow Core is a lightweight, embeddable workflow engine targeting .NET Standard, written in C and released under the MIT license. It lives in the .NET ecosystem, distributed as NuGet packages, and is built around the idea of long running processes that contain multiple tasks and must track their state between steps. Rather than running as a separate server, it is a library that is hosted inside an application, and it exposes a fluent C API for defining workflows. Workflows are expressed as a starting step followed by chained steps, and the same class can declare inputs and outputs that move data from one step …
read the full workflow-core overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Temporal or workflow-core more popular?
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars and workflow-core has 5,926. Temporal has the larger community by that measure.
Are Temporal and workflow-core free?
Both are open source. Temporal is licensed under MIT and workflow-core under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Temporal and workflow-core?
Temporal is written in Go and workflow-core in C#. 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 workflow-core?
Choose Temporal if you want the larger community (23,180 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose workflow-core if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.