ServiceNow Orchestration vs Temporal comparison

ServiceNow and Temporal Technologies are both solutions in the Process Automation category. ServiceNow is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.2, while Temporal Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6. ServiceNow holds a 4.4% mindshare in PA, compared to Temporal Technologies’s 7.0% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Temporal Technologies users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow Orchestration

Read 16 ServiceNow Orchestration reviews

2,094 Views
615 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Temporal

Read 17 Temporal reviews

1,735 Views
590 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

ServiceNow Orchestration

Temporal

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

ServiceNow Orchestration and Temporal are competing products in the workflow automation category. ServiceNow Orchestration has the upper hand in established enterprise environments due to its extensive integration capabilities, while Temporal offers more flexibility and scalability for developers.

Features: ServiceNow Orchestration includes robust integration options for multi-system environments, seamless automation of complex workflows, and strong support for enterprise ITSM transitioning to ESM. Its ability to spin cloud services automatically on approval and integrate with Microsoft products offers an edge for complex tasks. Temporal provides excellent support for long-running workflows, simplifies retry and rollback mechanisms, and handles distributed transactions efficiently in microservice environments. Its ability to manage retries and state durability is crucial for maintaining reliability.

Room for Improvement: ServiceNow Orchestration could improve on network connectivity testing and enhance user experience in scripting and UI tasks, which sometimes require expertise in Java. There are limitations in administrator connectivity testing for certain integrations. Temporal could offer more examples and streamlined onboarding for developers less familiar with event-driven architectures. Its complexities in handling signals, queries, and updates might pose challenges without prior knowledge. Providing more robust default settings and examples could enhance the initial learning curve.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: ServiceNow Orchestration provides a deployment model that integrates smoothly with existing systems, with dedicated support simplifying onboarding for enterprises. Temporal offers cloud-native deployment suited for developers building customized systems. Its community and documentation, while helpful, may require more initial adaptation than ServiceNow's structured support.

Pricing and ROI: ServiceNow Orchestration may involve higher upfront costs, yet delivers ROI through reduced integration challenges and streamlined enterprise processes. Temporal provides a cost-effective option prioritizing scalability, potentially resulting in substantial ROI as usage scales, though exact pricing is not publicly detailed.

To learn more, read our detailed ServiceNow Orchestration vs. Temporal Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Orchestration vs. Temporal

June 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

ServiceNow Orchestration

Ranking in Process Automation

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Temporal

Ranking in Process Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of ServiceNow Orchestration is 4.4%, up from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Temporal is 7.0%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Process Automation

Featured Reviews

ShaheenKapery

Solutions Architect at Altron

Easy to integrate, stable solution and incredibly good customer service

It is a long setup. It was customized to our company's requirements. Bearing in mind that there is not just an IT team. You've got an IT team consisting of end-users, consulting, and user support sides. Install support, ServiceNow support, application support, and so on. What ServiceNow does is it's really good at getting the tickets to the right person. That's the power of it. There's no issue with it. But you need to set that up in advance. You need to know the structure and who is responsible for each task. The initial setup does take a long time, and the organization might face some issues. But once you've got that resolved, it's amazing.

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AbhishekDash

Senior Software Engineer at A.P. Moller - Maersk

Orchestrates infrastructure tasks like deployment, deletion, and management

Temporal focus on developers rather than business users. In contrast to older workflow orchestration engines like Camunda, which are more business-oriented and strongly emphasize UI and workflow authoring, Temporal is geared toward developers. It provides extensive capabilities for building complex workflows. A standout feature of Temporal is its handling of long-running workflows, a significant advantage over many other solutions. Temporal excels in managing distributed transactions and application state durability, especially in microservice environments where transactions might fail due to network issues. Temporal simplifies these challenges by managing retries, fail-safes, and circuit breakers. As a result, developers don't need to implement these features manually; Temporal handles them implicitly, though it also allows for tuning based on specific needs.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The iTerm suite is also crucial for visibility and optimization."

"The product has a flexible interface for development."

"It has competitive AI capabilities."

"It's scalable."

"There are a lot of ready to use orchestration custom packs."

"The data visualization is good."

"Great with IT processes and business processes."

"The interface of the solution is very user friendly and it is easily accessible via a simple URL. This makes it easier to complete the UI based tasks but using other features require expertise in languages like Java. But along with that, there are limitation in terms of network connectivity testing and administrator faces regular challenges in conducting connectivity tests due to these limitations."

More ServiceNow Orchestration pros

"The most valuable feature is its ability to manage and automate workflows without manual intervention efficiently."

"The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to retry from an interrupted state."

"We like the fact that the whole process is durable, which is very useful to us."

"The tool is easy for a beginner to learn. The documentation covers activities, workflows, workers, servers, and more. While more examples could be beneficial, the existing resources are good enough to help you get started. There are also YouTube videos available that can provide additional context. The Slack community for Temporal is very active and helpful, similar to Stack Overflow, where you can find answers to a wide range of questions from basic to advanced levels. If you have a unique question, the community is responsive and provides knowledgeable support."

"The initial setup is easy."

"Temporal allows retryability for different workflows whenever they fail. It helps ensure idempotence and that things get done."

"The solution's most valuable features include its ability to simplify the management of complex workflows, improve system resilience and fault tolerance, and reduce the need for extensive boilerplate code."

"When some jobs take a lot of time and fail midway, the solution’s retry feature automatically causes them to retry."

More Temporal pros

Cons

"Frequent upgrades may negatively impact the performance of instances. Therefore, for now, I don't recommend any additional upgrades."

"From my space, the only thing that I can say is the spinning up with Google Cloud Services."

"I would like a user experience module to be added."

"There can be gaps in integration."

"The automatic remediation needs enhancement, particularly integrating ServiceNow with tools like SolarWinds and Logic Monitor. It is functional, but it needs improvement."

"It is a highly complex platform to work on."

"There is still room for more integrations. Or, it would be nice to bundle multiple products together rather than selling everything as a model as that turns out to be a bit costly."

"We cannot perform GUI automation using the tool."

More ServiceNow Orchestration cons

"While the tool can be a bit daunting initially, especially if you're not used to async programming models, it's generally a pleasure. There's always room for improvement, though. I've noticed some limitations with the .NET SDK regarding dynamic workflows, but this might have been improved in recent versions. Overall, I think Temporal could be more open about implementing features in a more—.NET-friendly way, especially in how you add workers and clients."

"Developers often mention the desire for a more intuitive visualization of workflow states."

"Temporal lacks many resources, like YouTube videos, which users can use to learn or refer to if they get stuck with the solution."

"Temporal's debugging is a bit complex."

"There are areas where Temporal could improve. For instance, calling multiple microservices with Temporal introduces latency due to workflow registration and analytics overhead."

"Temporal could be improved by making it more user-friendly for beginners and non-technical staff, ensuring easier integration and usability across different use cases."

"Configuring workflows can be improved —the solution could offer more options, but it's not a must-have."

"I don't like the limitations on data flow, particularly the difficulty of passing large amounts of data between different activities."

More Temporal cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ServiceNow doesn't give a clear cost indication. They have different contracts with different organizations and it's all about negotiation, so you don't know how they are doing at the cost level."

"It is not very expensive."

"Pricing is custom to every customer."

"It is quite expensive because we've had some customers come back and say it's quite pricey because in order for them to go ahead with Orchestration, they must have already been paying for Discovery, service mapping, and a few other things."

"The solution is costly and orchestrations are very expensive."

"The cost of the solution is based on the number of plugins, conductors and integrations used and is charged annually. The licensing cause has been increasing gradually which makes it difficult to access. Initially offer free features but over the time the charges rise which make it an expensive solution with limited features. Along with that, the integration issues persist and require additional middle where and internet connectivity for effective usage."

"This is an expensive product, but it is the best in the market considering the features and lack of competitors."

"In terms of price, this solution is at the higher end of what you'll find."

"Temporal is open-source and free to use, which is great. We didn't have to pay for any premium features."

"The savings weren't as big as we initially expected, but they were pretty great from a developer's perspective."

"The tool is open source under the MIT license, so there are no hidden fees. You can freely use everything on their GitHub and Docker images."

"Temporal is a free, open-source tool."

"It is worth the price."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

17%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ServiceNow Orchestration?

The interface of the solution is very user friendly and it is easily accessible via a simple URL. This makes it easier to complete the UI based tasks but using other features require expertise in l...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Orchestration?

The cost of ServiceNow Orchestration is considered medium; it is expensive but powerful. I would rate the pricing experience as a six out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow Orchestration?

The third-party integrations are challenging when the tools are not from ServiceNow ( /products/servicenow-reviews ) partners. This presents issues when integrating solutions from other vendors.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Temporal?

Temporal OSS is expensive in infrastructure, but it brings back the reliability that companies need.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Temporal?

The actual user interface is still in its early stages. It’s very basic. Users don’t really have a complex permission model yet. Users don’t really have ways to automate things like, for example, p...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Temporal?

We [my company] use it to run a large workload. We have a set of security scans we want to perform, and we distribute them over a full day, that’s over 24 hours. We use it to orchestrate all the st...

See all answers

Comparisons

Camunda vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 50% of the time

Control-M vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 16% of the time

IBM BPM vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 4% of the time

Nintex Process Platform vs ServiceNow Orchestration

Compared 3% of the time

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Camunda vs Temporal

Compared 48% of the time

Flowable vs Temporal

Compared 16% of the time

Orkes vs Temporal

Compared 15% of the time

Pega Platform vs Temporal

Compared 5% of the time

IBM BPM vs Temporal

Compared 2% of the time

More Temporal Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Orchestration

May 2025

Download ServiceNow Orchestration product report

Buyer's Guide

Temporal

May 2025

Download Temporal product report

Overview

ServiceNow is the fastest-growing enterprise cloud software company in the world above $1 billion (2018 revenue was $2.6 billion, up 36% year over year). We deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity to approximately 5,400 enterprise customers worldwide, including almost 75% of the Fortune 500.

ServiceNow

Temporal automates and manages workflows efficiently, offering resilience in distributed systems with features like retry and fault tolerance. Its capabilities in handling complex workflows and integrating with programming languages make it a valuable tool for managing diverse business logic.

Temporal excels in workflow orchestration, automating tasks across multiple platforms, and ensuring durability in asynchronous operations. It supports long-running workflows and simplifies handling distributed transactions, reducing boilerplate code. Temporal is noted for its durable execution and built-in retry policies, enhancing resilience. Despite its complexity and steep learning curve, it is valued for its integration with popular programming languages and relatively easy setup process, though it requires improvements in user-friendly features, documentation, community support, and security.

What are Temporal's key features?

Automation and Efficient Management: Automatically handles workflows without manual intervention.
Resilience and Fault Tolerance: Features built-in retry policies for increased reliability.
Integration: Supports various programming languages, easing development.
Distributed Transactions: Simplifies complex transaction handling with reduced boilerplate code.
Durable Execution: Ensures long-running workflows are reliably managed.

What benefits or ROI should users evaluate?

Scalability and Reliability: Enhances IT environments through robust workflow management.
Ease of Integration: Supports seamless multi-platform automation.
Improved Operational Efficiency: Reduces need for extensive coding, streamlining processes.
Durability and Fault Tolerance: Provides reliable asynchronous operations.

Temporal is implemented in sectors requiring robust workflow orchestration, such as managing data pipelines, API integration, and scheduling tasks. Organizations in a Kubernetes environment leverage it for its scalability and infrastructure management capabilities, securing integrations and enhancing reliability across IT operations.

Temporal Technologies

Sample Customers

experian, BEACHBODY, HealthPartners, Banosoft

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Orchestration vs. Temporal

June 2025

Free Report: ServiceNow Orchestration vs. Temporal

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