Orchest-Rated: Comparing Modern Workflow Orchestration Engines

At some point, every project outgrows a cron job. You need retries, backfills, dependency graphs between tasks, and real visibility into what ran, what failed, and why. That's the moment you start evaluating workflow orchestrators, and the landscape has gotten crowded: Airflow, Dagster, Hatchet, Temporal, Prefect, and more, each with its own opinions about scheduling, failure handling, and how much infrastructure you're signing up to run.

This month, Gordon Myers walks us through an in-depth, head-to-head comparison of the modern orchestration landscape. He'll get into how these tools differ in practice: developer experience, observability, operational overhead, and the kinds of tradeoffs that only show up once you're running them for real. Whether you're stuck maintaining a pile of cron jobs, weighing a move off Airflow, or just curious what else is out there, this talk should leave you with a much clearer map of the options.

Gordon Myers has been a software engineer for 18 years and is currently working as a Staff Engineer at ApartmentIQ, a software company founded in Madison