How does Trigger compare to tools like Temporal or Restate? If we put aside the AI use case, it seems like the fundamental feature is durable execution, where there are a few other options in the space.

The core is a durable execution engine, but there's a lot more needed to build good applications. Like being able to get realtime progress to users, or being able to use system packages you need to actually do the work (like ffmpeg, browsers etc).

Both of them are focused more on being workflow engines.

Temporal is a workflow engine – if you use their cloud product you still have to manage, scale, and deploy the compute.

With Temporal you need to write your code in a very specific way for it work, including working with the current time, randomness, process.env, setTimeout… This means you have to be careful using popular packages because they often using these common functions internally. Or you need to wrap all of these calls in side effects or activities.

Restate is definitely simpler than Temporal, in a good way. You wrap any code that's non-deterministic in their helpers so it won't get executed twice. I don't think you can install system packages that you need, which has been surprisingly important for a lot of our users.

I have used Temporal in the past in my previous job and currently using Prefect. All are similar in terms of durable and traced executions but this one seems to be tailored towards AI use cases where as others are more general.

I haven't tried Trigger, planning to give it a spin this weekend!