Seal vs. Temporal for human-in-the-loop approvals
Temporal is a durable workflow engine — you can model a human approval as a signal-driven wait, but you own the reviewer UI, Slack routing, policy evaluation, and the tamper-evident audit trail. Seal is a purpose-built approval control: one SDK call gives you the human off-switch, the console, and a hash-chained log without standing up and operating a workflow cluster.
| Dimension | Seal | Temporal |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Approval control | Durable workflows |
| Reviewer console + Slack | Included | Build it yourself |
| Policy engine | Built in | You write it |
| Tamper-evident audit | Hash-chained by default | Not built in |
| Infra to operate | None — hosted | Run and scale a cluster |
Use Temporal to orchestrate long-running, multi-step workflows. Add Seal for the approval step itself — even inside a Temporal workflow — when you want the gate, console, and audit trail without building them.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use Temporal for human-in-the-loop approvals?+
Yes — model the wait as a signal — but Temporal gives you durability, not an approval product. You still build the reviewer UI, Slack routing, policy evaluation, and audit trail. Seal provides those out of the box and can be called from inside a Temporal workflow.
Do Seal and Temporal compete?+
No, they compose. Temporal orchestrates the workflow; Seal is the approval control for the risky step. Call gate.require() from a Temporal activity to get the human decision and tamper-evident record without hand-building them.