What is the difference between orchestration and choreography in workflow automation?

Orchestration uses a central controller that directs the execution sequence of all workflow steps, managing state and handling failures from a single point. Choreography distributes decision-making across independent services that react to events without central coordination. Orchestration excels for complex business processes with conditional branching, compensation logic, and human approval steps because the central engine maintains global state and provides clear visibility. Choreography suits loosely coupled, event-driven systems where services independently react to business events via message brokers. Hybrid approaches are common in production: use orchestration for critical business workflows (order processing, employee onboarding) and choreography for event-driven integrations (data synchronization, notification fanout). Tools: orchestration engines include Temporal, Apache Airflow, Prefect, and n8n; choreography typically uses event brokers like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS EventBridge. Key trade-off: orchestration provides better observability and error handling but creates a single point of control; choreography is more resilient and scalable but harder to debug.