Orkes Conductor Human tasks vs Pushary

Orkes Conductor Human tasks

Escalation chains with a time limit per assignee and a choice of leaving the task open or failing the workflow. No built-in Slack or email prompt, so alerts need a trigger policy and a second workflow.

Pushary

Six small tools with a detailed skill that says when to ask, when to notify and when to stay quiet. No free plan, and the 3-day trial takes a card up front.

Orkes Conductor Human tasks

1. Give every assignment you want to escalate from a non-zero slaMinutes, since 0 never expires and nothing can follow it
2. Pick TERMINATE for risky actions so an unanswered approval fails the workflow instead of staying open to anyone
3. Start approval workflows with an idempotencyKey and RETURN_EXISTING, so a retried start doesn't ask twice
4. Refresh the JWT from /api/token with a set expiry instead of requesting one that never expires
5. Fetch single doc pages, not llms.txt, which is the whole documentation in 2.57 MB

Pushary

1. Read answered, status and handoffAction on every result, and never treat a timeout as approval
2. Expect ask_user to return at once with answered: false when the user's mode is notify-only or terminal-only
3. Poll wait_for_answer once (it waits at most 55 seconds), then follow the handoff instead of looping
4. Cancel a live question with cancel_question before asking the same thing in chat
5. Group open decisions into one select question, since each push interrupts the user