Temporal vs Jenkins, Git Actions, and Terraform

Here’s a diagram comparing where each tool sits and what actually makes Temporal different from the CI/CD and IaC tools:

The core distinction is what happens when something fails mid-run.

Jenkins and GitHub Actions are CI/CD pipeline tools. They react to an event (a push, a PR, a schedule), run a defined sequence of steps on a runner, and finish. If a step crashes, the run is typically dead — you re-trigger the pipeline and it starts over (or from the last completed stage, at best). They’re stateless between runs and built for short-lived jobs: minutes, occasionally hours.

Terraform is a different category entirely — infrastructure as code. You describe desired state in HCL, and Terraform diffs that against a state file to figure out what to create, change, or destroy. It’s not about running a sequence of business logic; it’s about converging real infrastructure toward a declared target. Runs are typically short and one-shot.

Temporal is a durable execution engine. You write workflows as regular code (functions in Go, Java, Python, TS), and Temporal persists every step of execution history. If a worker crashes, the process gets killed, or a step fails, the workflow resumes exactly where it left off — no re-running completed steps, no lost state. Because of this, Temporal workflows can run for months or years (think: a subscription billing cycle, a multi-step order fulfillment saga, a long human-approval process), not just minutes.

So the practical way to think about it: Jenkins/GitHub Actions automate your build-test-deploy events, Terraform manages your infrastructure’s desired state, and Temporal orchestrates long-running, stateful business logic that needs to survive failures — they solve genuinely different problems even though people sometimes lump them together as “automation tools.”