Orkes Conductor Human tasks vs Restate

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.

Restate

An awakeable pauses a handler at no compute cost and resumes it from one HTTP request, with a durable timeout, on a free plan of 100,000 actions a month. Restate sends nothing to the approver, so the Slack message, email or inbox is the builder's code, and the published terms and privacy statement predate the paid plans.

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

Restate

1. Create the awakeable, send its ID inside ctx.run, then await the promise, so a retry doesn't send a second approval request
2. Resolve with POST /restate/awakeables/<id>/resolve and a JSON body, or /reject with a text reason, which throws a terminal error in the handler
3. On Restate Cloud send Authorization: Bearer key_... to https://<env_id>.env.<region>.restate.cloud:8080. On a self-hosted server put an authenticating proxy in front of port 8080
4. Wrap the wait in orTimeout and decide what a timeout means. Without it the handler waits with no limit
5. Retry ingress errors only on 408, 425, 429 or 5xx, and only when x-restate-error-source isn't invocation