Decision guide

Choreography vs Orchestration

How should services coordinate a multi-step business process?

Side by side

Criterion	Choreography	Orchestration
Coupling	Event contracts between services	Services coupled to coordinator's commands
Visibility	Needs tracing to reconstruct	Central state per process
Changing the flow	Touches multiple services	Change the orchestrator
Failure handling	Distributed compensations	Centralized compensations/timeouts
Risk	Hidden cyclic dependencies	Orchestrator becomes a god service
Tooling	Brokers + tracing	Temporal, Step Functions, Camunda

When to choose each

Choreography

Services react to each other's events; no central coordinator.

Choose when

Short, stable flows (2–3 steps)
Highly decoupled teams

Avoid when

Long flows with many branches and timeouts

Orchestration

A coordinator (service or workflow engine) sends commands and tracks state.

Choose when

Complex flows with compensations and timeouts
Need for visibility and auditing of each process

Avoid when

Trivial notifications that don't need coordination

Verdict

Use choreography for simple, stable reactions; use orchestration (often a durable workflow engine) when a process has many steps, timeouts and compensations or when the business needs to see where each instance is.