Orkes Conductor Human tasks vs Trigger.dev

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.

Trigger.dev

Tokens complete from a backend, a pre-signed callback URL or the browser with a token scoped to one waitpoint. 10-minute default timeout on tokens.

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

Trigger.dev

1. Pass an explicit timeout to wait.createToken() and handle ok: false as a timeout
2. Use an idempotency key when creating the token so a retried step doesn't send the reviewer a second request
3. Give the browser the publicAccessToken, never the secret key, and don't call token.url from client code
4. Tag tokens with the user or task ID so pending approvals can be listed per reviewer
5. Start the MCP server with --readonly when the agent only needs to inspect runs