Catalyst Concepts
These pages explain what Catalyst is and why it works the way it does. For step-by-step instructions see Get Started or Develop.
Catalyst and Dapr
Catalyst is built on Dapr — the open-source distributed application runtime. Your applications use the same Dapr SDKs and building-block APIs they would use against a self-hosted sidecar (state, pub/sub, service invocation, bindings, secrets, workflows, actors, and more). Catalyst manages the runtime, infrastructure, and upgrades so you don't have to.
Beyond the managed runtime, Catalyst adds enterprise capabilities that Dapr OSS does not provide: a managed control plane, project and organisation isolation, SPIFFE-based workload identity, RBAC, the Catalyst console (workflow visualizer, agent registry, app graphs, metrics, API logs), multi-region execution, and an enterprise SLA.
For a side-by-side comparison of Dapr OSS and Catalyst, see Dapr Open Source.