Restate vs withHuman

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.

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.

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

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