Forget AWS Step Functions, Consider Unmeshed For A Scalable and Cost-Effective Solution

As enterprises scale, AWS Step Functions is a popular choice to automate distributed workflows, all within AWS ecosystem. But many teams face recurring challenges as they scale, challenges that limit flexibility. In this blog, we will highlight those challenges and to show you that Unmeshed could be the practical and modern solutions for today’s API-driven and AI-powered environment.

Challenge 1: Cost

When workflows volumes grow into the millions, Step Functions quickly become expensive and operationally heavy due to per-state billing and limited scaling flexibility, whereas Unmeshed offers fixed price, eliminating per-state billing entirely. It runs orchestration directly on lightweight infrastructure cutting both compute and operational costs. We offer massive saving as compared to Step Functions. If you want to know how much your team could save annually, contact us.

Challenge 2: Tight AWS Lock-In

Locked into to one ecosystem? Facing downtime from a regional outage? That’s the reality with AWS Step Functions with everything depends on AWS-managed services. Unmeshed breaks that boundary, offering multi-cloud by design and running seamlessly across AWS, Azure, GCP or even on-prem environments. This ensures your workflows keep running even when a region or provider experiences downtime. Being flexible is critical for enterprise that demand resilience and control.

Challenge 3: User/Developer-First Experience

Unlike AWS Step Functions which require developers to write complex JSON definitions, Unmeshed built drag-and-drop workflow builder, YAML-based definitions, real-time debugging, tracing and more. New features are continuously added and updated to ensure users and developers spend less time to code and more time on business logic.

Challenge 4: Not A Real-Time, Not An API-Driven Orchestration

AWS Step Functions does not natively support true real-time and API-driven orchestration the way Unmeshed does. For more clarity, we list down some pain points from AWS Step Functions itself:

• High Latency per Step - Each state transition in Step Functions adds measurable delay; on real-time or API-driven use cases such as chat or AI agent response come with high level of delay.
• Missing on Synchronous Flow - Step Functions are built for event-driven and developer must bolt on API Gateway or Lambda wrappers to simulate a real-time flow, causing developers spending more time to monitor, instead of building features.
• Limited Observability - CloudWatch logs is designed to observe execution data after completion, developers can’t see step progress, partial outputs or triggers as they happen.

Unmeshed solves this with built-in real-time orchestration with zero wait between steps. It provides unified support for both synchronous (request-response) and asynchronous (background) processes in one platform. Developers get to watch the live tracing and instant feedback loops with visual builder. Since it’s fully cloud-agnostic, it runs anywhere without dependency on AWS infrastructure.

Why Are Teams Moving to Unmeshed?

Unmeshed is built to modernize orchestration platform. By removing dependencies on AWS-specific services, Unmeshed delivers faster startup time, decreasing latency and greater resilience. If your team is scaling workflows across clouds or modernizing legacy orchestration, there’s never been a better time to move to Unmeshed.