Dapr vs Restate

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.

Restate is a durable execution runtime for building resilient services, workflows, and AI agents. It records progress during execution and resumes after failures without discarding completed work. Its building blocks include durable functions, workflows, Virtual Objects, queues, durable RPC, timers, signals, and flow control. The interface exposes execution journals and controls to cancel, kill, restart, or pause executions. Restate runs as a self-hosted single binary, managed Restate Cloud, or BYOC in a customer cloud account. Listed SDKs include TypeScript, Python, Java, Go, Kotlin, Rust, and Ruby. Integrations include Vercel AI SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, Google Gemini, Pydantic AI, and LangChain. The homepage reports under 10ms P99 latency overhead under load for durable actions. The Free plan is free for 50k durable actions monthly with no credit card. Restate Cloud starts at $75 a month.