Comment by crabmusket

There's some overlap and some similar use cases. I've seen a few people being confused between Durable Objects and Durable Execution.

Short writeup: https://crabmusket.net/2024/durable-execution-versus-session...

Summary:

I think the way to decide is, do you want to program with "objects" or "processes"?

I'd use Durable Objects (or what I called Session Backends in my article, after Jamsocket) if I wanted to model an "entity" that lasts indefinitely (e.g. a Figma doc, a user, a concert/event). I'd use a temporal/restate function for something that has a linear sequence of events and eventually comes to an end.

This isn't a hard rule. You can get the same outcome out of both technologies. (For example, Cloudflare built Workflows on top of Durable Objects; Rivet did the reverse.) You can use either one to implement the other, but you're going to be going out of your way based on what APIs are provided.