If you know trigger.dev, this is essentially Cloudflare’s version of Trigger, a technology I haven’t personally used but really want to. These two products are runtimes similar to Temporal, but with much simpler ergonomics.

I haven’t given much thought to the differences between these platforms, to be honest. However, one thing stands out: Trigger aims to run your existing Node.js codebase in its serverless runtime, while Cloudflare Workflows integrates with the Cloudflare V8 isolate system, which has some incompatibilities and does not support external API calls like napi. (Inversely, this can be a blessing because the Cloudflare Workers is sooo much simpler.)

Additionally, Cloudflare Workers provide about 60% of the value of something like Trigger because Workers’ pricing is based on CPU time rather than wall time. This means if you spend 2 ms making a call and wait a minute for it to return, you’re only billed for 2 ms of compute. The reliability and observability aspects are where workflows win out.