Sagas and Process Managers

This note connects the dedicated entries for sagas and process managers.

The concepts should not be collapsed. A process manager is the broader orchestration role: it gives a process identity, records progress or history, observes inputs, decides next steps, and emits commands or events across boundaries. A saga is a type of process manager specialized for business recovery and compensation.

Durable execution engines can also occupy the process-manager role when they own and advance process execution state. Their defining concern is execution recovery: continuing the same logical computation after interruption. A saga's defining concern is domain-level recovery: deciding how the domain process should proceed when the world no longer matches the original path.

The broader coordination distinction is described in orchestration and choreography. Process managers are the orchestration form. Choreography coordinates a process through participant-local rules over shared messages, events, logs, or protocols without one explicit process manager controlling the whole execution.