Sagas vs Temporal: where I actually land.
Both sagas and Temporal solve orchestration. They just ask you to pay in different currencies — operational surface, cognitive load, vendor gravity — and the interesting question is which bill your team is best equipped to pay.
When I reach for a saga
When the workflow is small, the steps are few, and I want to own the operational surface end to end. A saga is code I can read, test, and debug with the tools I already have. No new runtime, no new failure domain.
The distributed monolith isn't caused by microservices. It's caused by orchestration you can't see.
When I reach for Temporal
When durability and long-running workflows would otherwise mean reinventing a workflow engine — badly, and on a deadline. Temporal is worth the operational tax precisely when the alternative is building the same guarantees yourself.
The deciding question is rarely technical. It’s who pays the operational tax: your team, or a vendor you now depend on.
Where I land
Default to sagas until the coordination itself becomes the hard part. When it does, reach for the engine — and don't pretend you could have skipped it.