Orkes Conductor Human tasks vs Temporal

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.

Temporal

Waits of any length with a timeout survive worker restarts and deploys. No reviewer inbox, notifications or routing, so the human side is all your code.

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

Temporal

1. Put the decision in a typed Signal payload (approver, decision, comments, timestamp) instead of a bare boolean
2. Always wait with a timeout and treat the timeout path as a rejection or an escalation on purpose
3. Use the workflow ID as the approval ID, so the reviewer's tool only needs one value to send the Signal
4. Use an Update instead of a Signal when the approver's tool needs an acknowledgement back
5. Expect ResourceExhausted under load and let the SDK retry it, since signals are throttled last