Inngest
A platform for running reliable background jobs, scheduled tasks and multi-step workflows — it automatically retries failures and remembers where each job left off, so long-running processes don't silently break.
🔗 Visit Inngest
Description
When an app needs to do work in the background — send a batch of emails, process an upload, run a nightly report, or drive an AI agent through several steps — a lot can go wrong: a step fails, a server restarts, something accidentally runs twice. Inngest handles that reliability for you: you write ordinary code, and it makes sure each step runs, retries the ones that fail, and picks up exactly where it left off.
Inngest is a durable-execution platform: you define event-driven, multi-step functions in TypeScript, Python, Go or Kotlin/Java, and each step is independently retried, idempotent and resumable without you standing up queues, pub/sub or state stores. It bundles flow control — rate limiting, per-tenant concurrency, throttling — into single lines of code, plus tracing, replay and observability aimed at background jobs and AI agents. The SDKs are Apache 2.0; the server is source-available (SSPL) with hosted-SaaS and self-host options. It is used in production by companies including Replit, ElevenLabs, Cohere and Resend.
💬 Our review
The short version: Inngest lets you get durable, retryable background steps into an existing app faster than almost anything else — you add its SDK and keep writing normal functions, instead of adopting a whole orchestration platform.
Its biggest practical advantage is low migration cost: unlike Temporal, which is powerful but asks you to restructure code around workflows and run your own cluster, Inngest slots into a serverless or existing backend with minimal ceremony, which is why it is often the pragmatic default for application teams. The event-driven model and built-in flow control (per-tenant concurrency, throttling) are genuinely useful for SaaS and AI workloads that fan out. The honest caveats: the server is SSPL, not fully open source, so true self-hosting freedom is more limited than the Apache-2.0 SDKs suggest; at high volume the hosted pricing (99/mo Pro, then per-execution) can climb, so model your execution counts; and for very complex, long-lived orchestration with strict guarantees, a heavier engine like Temporal or Restate may still fit better. Its closest head-to-head is Trigger.dev, which is worth comparing directly.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Hobby free (50K executions/mo, 5 concurrent). Pro 99/mo (1M+ executions, +50 per extra 1M, more concurrency). Enterprise custom (SAML, RBAC, audit trails, 90-day trace retention).
Pros
Lowest-friction way to add durable, retryable steps to an existing app
Event-driven model with built-in flow control (concurrency, throttling, rate limits)
Multi-language SDKs (TypeScript, Python, Go, Kotlin/Java)
Proven in production (Replit, ElevenLabs, Cohere, Resend)
Cons
Server is source-available (SSPL), not fully open source
Hosted pricing can climb at high execution volume
Heavy, long-lived orchestration may fit Temporal/Restate better