When do durable services patterns make more sense than workflow engines?

Durable services patterns can make sense when the application is naturally modeled as stateful services that receive messages, process events, and persist progress as part of service behavior. Workflow engines are often better when a team needs explicit multi-step process coordination, long-running tasks, timers, retries, and clear workflow history. AI agent systems may use both patterns: services for durable application behavior and workflows for agent execution paths. Teams should choose based on how work is coordinated, observed, and recovered. Diagrid's Dapr foundation is relevant because it includes workflows alongside other distributed application APIs.