Temporal Cloud vs self-hosted: which should you choose in 2026?
Quick Answer: Temporal Cloud is managed durable execution with 99.9-99.95% SLA starting around $200/month at low volume, suited to teams without Cassandra ops experience. Self-hosted Temporal is Apache 2.0 open source with realistic infrastructure cost of $2,500-$4,500/month plus operational labor, suited to high-volume workloads or compliance-driven deployments.
Temporal Cloud vs Self-Hosted: Direct Comparison
Temporal (founded 2019) is offered as Temporal Cloud (managed) and as Temporal Server (Apache 2.0 open-source self-host). Both run the same codebase; the difference is who operates the persistence layer and the services.
Pricing (May 2026)
Temporal Cloud Standard pricing is consumption-based: $25/M Actions plus Active Storage and Retained Storage GB-month. Small-medium production deployments land in $200-$2,000/month; high-volume deployments can exceed $50,000/month. Mission Critical tier adds higher SLA at roughly 2x consumption multiplier.
Self-hosted is Apache 2.0 license-free; cost is infrastructure + labor. A typical small production self-host runs $2,500-$4,500/month for Cassandra cluster, Temporal services, Elasticsearch, backups, and monitoring, plus 0.25-1.0 FTE operational time.
Crossover Point
Self-hosted becomes cost-competitive at roughly 30-50M Actions/month for organizations that already operate Kubernetes and Cassandra. Below that volume, Cloud is almost always cheaper once labor is included.
When Each Wins
Cloud wins for low-to-moderate volume, teams without Cassandra experience, and standard SOC 2/HIPAA compliance needs. Self-hosted wins for compliance/data residency that rules out multi-tenant cloud, very high action volume where consumption pricing exceeds infrastructure cost, and teams that already operate Cassandra at scale.
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