Temporal vs LangChain

Temporal

LangChain

Temporal · 16 features

• Activities — Retryable units of work.
• Activity Retries — Declarative retry policies.
• Child Workflows — Nested workflow composition.
• Continue-As-New — Close + restart workflow to prune history.
• Nexus (cross-namespace) — Call workflows across namespaces/teams.
• Queries — Synchronous read of workflow state.
• Saga / Compensations — Rollback pattern via compensating activities.
• Schedules — Cron-like recurring workflows.
• Self-Host — Deploy cluster on your infra.
• Signals — Async messages into a running workflow.
• Timers — Durable sleeps — hours, days, months.
• Update — Synchronous RPC into workflow with validation.
• Visibility + Search Attrs — Query workflow state via Elasticsearch/native store.
• Web UI — Inspect workflow history, events, stack.
• Workflows — Durable, replayable, long-running functions.
• Workflow Versioning — Patch workflow code without breaking in-flight runs.

LangChain · 18 features

• Agents — Tool-using agents with reasoning loops.
• Chains (LCEL) — LangChain Expression Language — pipe primitives into chains.
• Checkpointers (LangGraph) — Persist agent state to SQL, Mongo, Redis, Postgres.
• Document Loaders — 150+ loaders for PDF, HTML, Notion, Google Drive, S3, GitHub, etc.
• Human-in-the-loop — Pause agent for approval, then resume.
• LangGraph — Stateful graph-based agent runtime. Durable, replayable, human-in-the-loop.
• LangGraph Platform — Managed hosting for LangGraph agents with state persistence.
• LangGraph Studio — Desktop IDE for debugging agent graphs.
• LangServe — Deploy chains as FastAPI endpoints.
• Memory — Buffer, summary, entity, vector memory stores.
• Output Parsers — Structured JSON, Pydantic schemas, function calling.
• Prompt Templates — Templating + partial filling + output parsers.
• RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) — Standard patterns + 50+ retrievers.
• Streaming — First-class streaming at every layer.
• Subgraphs — Compose agent graphs hierarchically.
• Text Splitters — Recursive, token, semantic splitters for chunking.
• Tools — 400+ pre-built tools (web search, code, databases, APIs).
• Vector Store Integrations — 60+ vector DBs (Pinecone, Chroma, Weaviate, PGVector, Qdrant, Milvus).