Orkes Conductor Human tasks vs withHuman

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.

withHuman

The approval API is small and carefully specified, with a public OpenAPI 3.1 document, mandatory idempotency keys and agent credentials that can never approve. The service is in early access under its own terms, with no status page, published rate limits or changelog, and the open-source repository the site links to returned 404 on 8 October 2026.

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

withHuman

1. Send an Idempotency-Key header on POST /api/aap/v1/requests. The call answers 400 without one
2. Read the decision with GET /api/aap/v1/requests/{id}?wait=30s and repeat while status is pending. wait is capped at 30 seconds
3. Set timeout between one second and seven days, and treat expired and cancelled as a refusal
4. Start an approved call within five minutes of decided_at, because the decision carries an expires_at
5. Cancel a request when you stop waiting, so reviewers stop seeing it