Temporal vs vCenter Orchestrator comparison

Temporal Technologies and VMware are both solutions in the Process Automation category. Temporal Technologies is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.6, while VMware is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.1. Additionally, 94% of Temporal Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Temporal

Read 17 Temporal reviews

1,417 Views
1,108 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

vCenter Orchestrator

Read 50 vCenter Orchestrator reviews

165 Views
127 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Temporal

vCenter Orchestrator

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

vCenter Orchestrator and Temporal compete in workflow automation and management. Temporal has the upper hand due to its developer-focused features like microservices support and retry mechanisms.

Features: vCenter Orchestrator manages virtual environments with features like HA, DRS, and robust backup tools. It integrates seamlessly with VMware products for comprehensive management. Temporal offers extensive workflow management tools, retry mechanisms, and scalability, ideal for handling long-running workflows and distributed transactions.

Room for Improvement: vCenter Orchestrator users mention high costs, integration challenges with non-VMware products, and the need for better user-friendliness. Temporal could improve its resource documentation and security features, with users noting a steep learning curve for those unfamiliar with distributed workflows.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: vCenter Orchestrator is mostly used in on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, with mixed reviews on technical support. Temporal supports both on-premises and cloud deployments, though it could enhance its support and documentation. Temporal's deployment versatility suits varied environments well.

Pricing and ROI: vCenter Orchestrator is considered expensive, with escalating costs for additional features, yet it provides substantial ROI for large enterprises. Temporal, as an open-source tool, offers flexibility and scalability without licensing fees, though infrastructure management costs may vary in cloud settings.

To learn more, read our detailed Temporal vs. vCenter Orchestrator Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Temporal vs. vCenter Orchestrator

April 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

Temporal

Ranking in Process Automation

7th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

vCenter Orchestrator

Ranking in Process Automation

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

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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David Villota

EMEA Hosting Engineer at Yanfeng Automotive

Provides automatic monitoring capabilities that save time for users

In my company's IT environment, we use the tool to deploy production environments for products, including live manufacturing systems. The product improves my company's IT automation processes since we can use fewer resources currently. In my company, we need to spend less time considering that vCenter Orchestrator monitors everything. In general, we don't have to be present in our company to do active monitoring. Automatic monitoring is available for everything with vCenter Orchestrator, so we have proactive alerts in our company. The most valuable feature of the product in streamlining our company's workflow stems from the fact that we need to spend fewer resources and less time in general. Our company can spend time on more effective tasks like working with the plans to improve processes and so on, instead of taking care of the systems. The benefits of the product's integration capabilities were useful for HPE. My company has HPE infrastructure, and we are keen to integrate everything into the host, VMware ESXi. It is really important to have an easy integration method that allows for everything to be installed easily in a matter of minutes. I was not involved in the product's setup process. My colleague took care of the product's setup process. From what I know, I can say that the product's setup phase was straightforward. Some custom setups were to be done manually in the tool, but everything was well documented. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. One of the benefits of the product is that it is a low-cost and stable solution that offers a lot of resources. I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

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

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

"It is very useful for long-running workflows."

"The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to fix things quickly."

"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."

"The most valuable thing about Temporal is that we can create multiple and child workflows. We can segregate work as we want, which is good for work organization. It's also easy to maintain. We're trying to generate and fill PDF forms with custom data, including digital signatures. We call AWS and do all activities through Temporal, like calling and saving data in buckets. We do this because we have a lot of load, with multiple users requesting data. We have two types of users: admin and customer. The admin creates forms, and employees or customers fill them out. When admin gets a form, it's stored in Temporal."

"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."

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

More Temporal pros

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

"The most valuable feature is that it's simple and very ergonomic to use the product compared to other virtualizing product. Out of Microsoft, Red Hat, and IBM, we found VMware to be the best one."

"It's 100% stable, it's always stable. We haven't had any bugs. The solution works very well and we haven't had any problems."

"The storage motion is a good feature. It is a very good tool."

"The solution was easy to install."

"The backup and recovery times are very quick."

"It has the best workflow feature."

"vCenter Orchestrator's best features are the workflows, integration with third-party applications, and the workflow library."

More vCenter Orchestrator pros

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."

"Temporal doesn't have built-in data storage to store the state of the ongoing execution."

"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."

"Temporal images aren’t FIPS compliant, and we have to be FIPS compliant."

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

"One area where I think Temporal could improve is its dashboard, particularly in event tracking. Currently, the dashboard doesn't show a time-based view of events, meaning it doesn't display when an event started or went through the retry process. If this feature could be added in a future release, it would significantly enhance monitoring capabilities. Other than that, Temporal's overall performance is quite impressive, and we're confident we can migrate to the Temporal workflow."

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

"Temporal's debugging is a bit complex."

More Temporal cons

"The cost of the solution is high."

"When the SSO certificate needs to be renewed, the upgrading and testing are quite complicated."

"There are no good manuals or guidelines on integrations. Hence, you need to be asking someone."

"The response time of vCenter Orchestrator's support could be improved."

"Enhancing the platform's setup process intuitiveness and offering more flexible pricing options could further improve its accessibility across different company sizes."

"We encounter challenges related to the renewal of support subscriptions."

"The solution’s pricing and integration could be improved."

"This solution needs to have more built-in workflows."

More vCenter Orchestrator cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is worth the price."

"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."

"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."

"vCenter Orchestrator is an expensive solution."

"My company needs to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."

"We renew the solution's license every one or two years."

"Our licensing is on a yearly basis. We pay for the license and then we pay the support every year."

"vCenter Orchestrator could be more affordable."

"vCenter Orchestrator is a very expensive solution."

"We provide the VMware solution to our clients, for which they pay a perpetual license."

"I rate the product price a seven to eight out of ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."

More vCenter Orchestrator pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

27%

Computer Software Company

18%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Government

12%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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

What do you like most about vCenter Orchestrator?

The stability of the product is very good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vCenter Orchestrator?

We're running a low-profile budget. This is not our main focus on investment technology, so we're trying to reduce costs due to the change from perpetual to subscription licenses.

See all answers

What needs improvement with vCenter Orchestrator?

After the change from perpetual licensing to subscriptions, the cost model changed. We are considering alternatives since we lost the perpetual aspect, and support is changing.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 49% of the time

Flowable vs Temporal

Compared 16% of the time

Orkes vs Temporal

Compared 14% of the time

Pega Platform vs Temporal

Compared 5% of the time

Rundeck vs Temporal

Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 54% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs vCenter Orchestrator

Compared 22% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs vCenter Orchestrator

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator vs vCenter Orchestrator

Compared 12% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Temporal

April 2025

Download Temporal product report

Buyer's Guide

vCenter Orchestrator

April 2025

Download vCenter Orchestrator product report

Overview

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

VMware vCenter Orchestrator simplifies the automation of complex IT tasks and integrates with VMware vCloud Suite components to adapt and extend service delivery and operational management, effectively working with existing infrastructure, tools and processes.

VMware

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Beiersdorf Shared Services

Buyer's Guide

Temporal vs. vCenter Orchestrator

April 2025

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