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I’m confused on something. What’s the difference between Temporal and something like Dagster/Airflow/Prefect? Is there a difference between ETL and workflows? Or is just branding?

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From my limited understanding, Dagster and Airflow are limited DAG-based tools compared to Temporal that lets you write your logic in the programming language directly (loops, conditionals, coroutines, other libraries, etc) so long as you remain deterministic. Prefect I am also not that familiar with so I can't tell if their "flows" have limited logic they can do from Python, but they do not seem to support things like signals/queries at first glance.

One big difference is those three are Python only, and Temporal is Go, Java, JS/TypeScript, Python, PHP, and .NET. Usually another difference between most workflow tooling and Temporal (granted I have not checked with these) is the care they take in handling errors, retry, replay, cancel, etc so that'd be worth checking as well.

ETL tools target that specific use case, versus Temporal workflows are much more general purpose—for any backend code you want to run reliably. I wrote some more about this here: https://community.temporal.io/t/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-o...

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