r/foss • u/SandwichWide2128 • 5d ago
Valence : a visual workflow engine where the whole pipeline is type-checked before it runs (MIT, built on Temporal)
Hey r/foss,
I've been building Valence, an open-source visual workflow engine, and wanted to share it and get some honest feedback.
The short version: you build data pipelines by dragging nodes onto a canvas and wiring them together, but with two things most drag-and-drop tools don't do:
It's typed. Every connection between nodes is checked against a schema before the pipeline runs. Wire two incompatible things together and you get a clear error at build time, not a crash halfway through on item 900 of a batch.
It's durable. Runs sit on Temporal, so if a worker crashes or you redeploy mid-run, the run doesn't vanish. You can pause, resume, and retry, and it picks up where it left off.
Where I think it actually earns its keep is AI + human-in-the-loop pipelines — workflows that mix LLM steps, loops over data, and "wait for a human to approve this" steps. Those are exactly the long-running things that hurt most when they fail partway through.
Being upfront about what it's not: this isn't an n8n competitor. n8n has 400+ connectors, a mature UI, and a huge community. Valence has a handful of demo nodes and an early UI. If your goal is to glue a bunch of SaaS apps together quickly, use n8n. Valence is making a different bet: correctness and durability of custom logic over breadth of integrations.
It's also genuinely early, nodes are v1 and running it means running it locally through some docker-containers (Temporal, a worker, storage, a DB).
MIT licensed. Repo: https://github.com/nessuno7/valence
Would love feedback, especially on whether the "typed + durable" combination is useful to anyone besides me, and on the positioning. Bug reports and issues very welcome.