Blog
2025-11-26
Obelisk and DBOS are both open-source durable
workflow engines.
Let's see how they compare in terms of ease of use, nondeterminism prevention and performance.
I will go through the Learn
DBOS Java tutorial and compare it with Rust version of the same code written for Obelisk. I
chose Java because of familiarity, however the library has just been released so the code is still
quite young. On the Obelisk side, Rust is the obvious choice as it has the best
performance and
tooling.
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2025-10-29
November marks 2 years since I started working on Obelisk, an OSS workflow engine written in Rust.
As a reflection on its capabilities I have decided to make a friendly comparison with
WindMill, which produced an interesting
benchmark accompanied by a
blog post titled
Fastest self-hostable open-source workflow engine.
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2025-10-13
Contrary to vibe coding, usually defined as irresponsible running of LLM generated code with no real
code review, leading to security, debugging and maintenance nightmares, "vibe engineering" was
defined as
"iterating with coding agents to produce production-quality code".
Here is how deterministic workflow engines, and specifically Obelisk, can help with the transition.
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2025-10-06
Obelisk is an open-source deterministic workflow engine that runs, stores, and replays WASM-based
workflows using SQLite.
The headline change in v0.25: every function in workflows and activities is now required to be
fallible. Obelisk maps execution-failed errors into the called function's return type. This
ensures traps and errors are handled explicitly instead of silently breaking execution.
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2025-09-09
Obelisk is an open-source deterministic workflow engine that runs, stores, and replays WASM-based
workflows using SQLite.
There have been many changes since the
initial public release 0.19.1, mostly focused on
structured concurrency ergonomics, adding more abilities to activities and exploring using other
languages than Rust for authoring WASM Components.
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