[lorendsr]

Traditional workflow systems are often used for specific types of business processes, particularly those that are async like human-in-the-loop.

Temporal, while it uses the "workflow" terminology, is a new type of thing. At a basic level, it's "do you want your backend code to run reliably?" If yes, and you're okay with the latency hit of each step getting persisted for you, then the answer is "use Temporal to write your backend code." It's a new programming model that lets you develop at a higher level of abstraction, where you don't have to be concerned about faults in the hardware or network or downstream services/3rd party APIs being temporarily down. Where you no longer have to code retries, timeouts, use task queues, or use a message bus to communicate between services. And oftentimes don't even need to use a database.