Temporal.io
Temporal.io solves distributed workflow reliability by making long-running processes durable, resumable, and observable. The tradeoff is a testing model that differs significantly from standard service testing. Workflows must be deterministic — the same history must always produce the same decisions — and Activities are where all the non-deterministic work
Prefect
Prefect 2 has a developer-friendly testing story. Flows and tasks are plain Python functions with decorators — you can call them directly in tests, run them with local storage instead of remote infrastructure, and control state management without spinning up Prefect Cloud. This guide covers the full testing surface: task
Saga Pattern
The saga pattern solves distributed transaction consistency without two-phase commit. Instead of atomic transactions across services, sagas use a sequence of local transactions where each step has a corresponding compensation action. When step 4 of 6 fails, steps 1–3 are undone through their compensating transactions. Sagas are correct