Restate
BUSL durable execution engine; self-host free, Apache after 4 years
DevOps / Workflows · Source-available · 4.6k
Reviewed 2026-10-19 · last push 2026-10-18 · repo checked 2026-10-19
What's Good
Release v1.8.0 (2026-10-14), ★4,575 in about 198 weeks (~23 a week), still pushed daily. One self-hostable server journals every step, so a function resumes where it failed instead of rerunning side effects. You get durable workflows, virtual objects with per-key state and queues, timers, and idempotent calls between services, plus flow control (virtual queues are on by default in 1.8).
You write plain code with the SDKs for TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, Python, Go and Rust; the SDKs are MIT. It runs next to your services on servers, Kubernetes or serverless functions, and there is a managed Restate Cloud if you do not want to operate it.
The Catch
License first: the server is under the Business Source License 1.1, which is source-available, not OSI open source. You can self-host it for free and use it in production for your own services and workflows, including an internal platform for your company or a public product that wraps it behind your own UI, DSL or API. What you cannot do is run a public managed service where outside developers register their own services and call Restate's APIs directly. Each release turns into Apache-2.0 four years after it ships. The SDKs are MIT. Upgrades need care (1.8 requires every node on 1.7.3 or newer first and a one-time partition migration), and it is a smaller ecosystem than Temporal. Check Restate Cloud pricing on restate.dev.
Verdict
Durable execution in one binary, free to self-host for your own apps; just do not resell it as a hosted Restate.
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