Cloudflare Workflows vs Dapr

Cloudflare Workflows lets developers build durable, multi-step applications on Cloudflare Workers without managing infrastructure. It automatically retries failed tasks, handles errors, and preserves state for minutes, hours, or weeks. Workflows can pause for seconds, hours, or days, or wait for webhooks, user input, or external system responses before continuing. Instances may be triggered, paused, resumed, or terminated through code or an API. A workflow can call Fetch API requests and Cloudflare services including R2, KV, and D1, and can be invoked through the Workers API, Wrangler CLI, or REST API. Billing covers CPU time, requests, persisted storage, and executed steps; waiting or sleeping does not incur CPU time. Workers Free includes a free plan with usage limits, while paid pricing starts at $5/mo. Paid plans allow up to five minutes of CPU time per invocation. The service has a cloud deployment model, supports human tasks and approvals, long-running workflows, versioning, and up to 50,000 concurrent runs. Workflows cannot be deployed to Workers for Platforms namespaces.

Dapr is an open-source runtime that provides APIs for durable workflows and distributed application services. Its workflows handle long-running stateful processes with retries, timers, human approvals, and sagas. Dapr also supports AI agents using checkpointed plans to recover after failures. Service invocation offers HTTP or gRPC communication with discovery, tracing, and error handling; additional APIs cover pub/sub, state, actors, jobs, secrets, configuration, bindings, distributed locks, and cryptography. Dapr runs as a sidecar process or container, keeping its runtime code out of application code. It can run on Kubernetes or self-hosted on Windows, Linux, or macOS machines, including physical and virtual machines across cloud and edge environments. Security includes mTLS encryption in transit, access policies, and automatic certificate rotation. Stable SDKs are available for.NET, Python, Java, Go, PHP, and JavaScript. Dapr is free and open source. Separate paid options include Dedicated Cloud starting at $1,199 a month and BYOC starting at $1,599 a month; both list a first 14 days free.