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Temporal vs Windmill

Windmill scores higher on the AgentReady, 64/100 against 46/100. They differ on 7 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Temporal. Temporal is an open-source platform for building applications with durable execution, used by companies like OpenAI, Lovable, Replit, Cursor, and Retool to add agentic capabilities to applications.

Windmill. Windmill is a fast, open-source workflow engine and developer platform.

Where Temporal is ahead

Temporal passes authentication documented, and Windmill does not. That is understand, whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it.

Where Windmill is ahead

Windmill passes clear product positioning, and Temporal does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds understand: structured api reference and limits / constraints documented. Temporal misses those.

And on adopt, agent-compatible signup flow and official python sdk. Temporal misses those.

Finally, on operate, agent compatibility verified. Temporal misses it.

What neither does

Both fail mcp discoverable, openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Windmill leads 87 to 73. Temporal misses clear product positioning, mcp discoverable; Windmill misses mcp discoverable.

Understand. Windmill leads 46 to 31. Temporal misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; Windmill misses openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented.

Adopt is whether an agent can get a key and make its first successful call without a human in the loop. Windmill leads 67 to 45. Temporal misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, official python sdk, mcp integration available; Windmill misses no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available.

Operate. Windmill leads 56 to 35. Temporal misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified; Windmill misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable.

Pricing

Temporal starts at $100/mo and has a free tier. Windmill does not publish one and has a free tier.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Windmill clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Temporal and Windmill. Alternatives to each: Temporal, Windmill.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["temporal", "windmill"]}