Restate vs Trigger.dev

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.

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.

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

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