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Comment by gsanderson | Hacker News Reader

I was recently looking for a simpler alternative to Temporal (https://temporal.io/) so this could be ideal. If you could add instructions for self-hosting it (_sounds_ like you just need an Express server, but I would guess some backend persistent store/database/queue too) that would be great. The Webhook catalog only lists Github: I think integrating with Stripe would be neat. Like, when someone pays an invoice, Stripe calls a webhook. That could trigger an action.

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"A simpler alternative to Temporal" is a good description for us. We'll get a self-hosting guide up soon for you. We're adding integrations that people ask for as fast as we can build them and Stripe is high on that list :)

As someone curious to try out Temporal. What makes you think it is not simple, is it tricky enough that one should avoid it?

What else makes this Trigger.dev stand out compared to Temporal? Temporal already has self hosting option, multiple language support and a battle proven history. Even if trigger looks good on paper, it would need some other really convincing reason for me to consider a completely fresh tool over something more proven, that appears to fill the same space.

Good to see some competition in this space though. Workflows are too important to be relegated to flaky scripts, diy workflow engines or worst of all: yaml-as-code.

I share that curiosity! Temporal looks great and is proven. Running it looks simple enough. I mean getting their self-hosted version deployed (to production). I was reading through their docs and that does _not_ look simple (to me). Plus the guide is open about being a work in progress (https://docs.temporal.io/cluster-deployment-guide#elasticsea...). I am going to try it at some point though.

The simplest way to self-host is with Render: https://render.com/docs/deploy-temporal

Scaling takes a lot of expertise, and I'd say almost everyone saves time & money and gains in reliability by using Temporal Cloud over self-hosting.

We do this at windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill, including self-hosting instructions and pre-made integrations with stripe

Does windmill have any way of going into code, without it basically becoming "code in a input box". The developer first solution trigger.dev have here is really scratching a real problem. But as they say they are not for the easiest workflows. I'm really looking for something that is gui first but as a drop down to code when you want. But inline code editor, let me save it to a git repo or similar. And don't have globals aka zapiers inputData and output.

> I'm really looking for something that is gui first but as a drop down to code when you want. But inline code editor, let me save it to a git repo or similar.

That's like, exactly what we are, take a look at this screenshot for instance: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/imgs/win...

As for syncing code to git, we do it as well through our CLI and Github Actions: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-sync-example

WOW. I have been looking into this at work today, and windmill is def. what I was looking for, a low-code solution that do not hate code (as text). Thank you so much for creating this. The value prop. that you have in the intro[1] is perfect. The first paragraph on github is maybe correct. But I'm still not sold on what it actually does. Marketing is hard. Hope you will succeeded, the product looks great!

[1] https://docs.windmill.dev/docs/intro/

Windmill looks cool! I've always wanted to write something like Huginn [1] available as a single binary.

Can I ask, what were the benefits of writing a new workflow engine instead of building around Temporal?

1 - https://github.com/huginn/huginn

The biggest reason is to be able to deploy, as you mentioned, windmill as a single binary that you can then easily scale horizontally. The second one is deeply rooted to how it works, it is running fork of those scripts calling the interpreter of those respective languages. It has pros and cons but you can do interesting things like having workflows in different languages, first step in python, second step in go.

Overall it would have been possible to build this on top of Temporal but the biggest benefit of Temporal, which is idempotency/checkpointing is not something we could have offered at the level of abstraction that we operate, running arbitrary single scripts piped together using a result graph and a shared mounted folder. So why bother?

Ah, ok. Thanks. I'll take a look at that too.

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