Temporal vs LangSmith

Temporal

LangSmith

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.

LangSmith · 14 features

• Alerts — Threshold alerts on latency, cost, eval metrics.
• Annotation Queues — Human-review workflows for trace quality rating.
• Custom Dashboards — Aggregate metrics dashboards per project/tag.
• Datasets — Collect examples → use as eval sets or training data.
• Evaluations — LLM-as-judge, embedding similarity, custom Python evaluators, offline batch eval…
• LangChain Integration — Auto-trace any LangChain/LangGraph run with env var.
• LangGraph Integration — First-class trace + eval for LangGraph agents.
• LLM Tracing — Automatic trace every LLM call + tool call + chain step.
• OpenTelemetry Export — Export traces as OTLP to Datadog/Honeycomb/etc.
• Playground — Test prompts + models inline before deploying.
• Prompt Canvas — Visual prompt editor with live test + eval.
• Prompt Hub — Public + private prompt library with versioning.
• Self-Hosted (Enterprise) — Docker + k8s deployment in your infra.
• Threads + Sessions — Group traces into conversational sessions.