In the context of striving for more efficient production processes, the further development of hard coatings is an important factor as these coatings can influence properties such as wear, force, and temperature behavior. In this study, the performance of (Ti,Al,Ta,Ce)N coatings in dry longitudinal turning is compared with the industrial standard coatings TiN and (Ti,Al)N. For the experiments, cutting inserts were coated with the specified materials and tested by combining two different cutting speeds (90 and 300 m/min) and two different feed rates (0.1 and 0.2 mm/rev). During these experiments, the width of the wear mark, the cutting force (using a dynamometer from Kistler), and the temperature on the rake face (using a two-color pyrometer with laser optics) were determined. These studies showed that (Ti,Al,Ta,Ce)N is an improvement over TiN and (Ti,Al)N at higher cutting speeds of 300 m/min and exhibits only a slight increase in cutting force and wear over the length of cut (0 to 1000 m) and – unlike (Ti,Al)N – does not exceed the permissible wear mark width of 200 µm.