Inngest vs Temporal
Two sides of the background jobs & cron decision: hosted job platform and durable workflow engine. When each fits, what it costs, who moves from one to the other, and what makers who chose it say.
Which fits you
Choose Inngest if- One user action kicks off several steps with waits between them
Use it whenOne user action fans out into several steps with waits and sleeps in between.
Trade-offPricing scales with executions and steps, so chatty workflows cost more.
Choose Temporal if- A process runs for days or months and must pick up where it left off after a crash
Use it whenA process spans minutes to months and a failed step must resume where it left off, not restart.
Trade-offYou run worker processes, plus the Temporal server or Temporal Cloud billed per action; workflow code must be deterministic.
At a glance
| Inngest | Temporal | |
|---|---|---|
| Used by | 16 makers' products · 11 open-source projects | 29 makers' products · 15 open-source projects |
| Cost at default usagejob runs or steps 100k runs, job compute time 20 hours | $99/mo Pro | $5.50/mo Developer (pay as you go) |
| Downloads | 1.6M/wk+125% vs npm | 3.7M/wk+64% vs npm |
| Pricing | Free tier (50k executions/month); paid plans scale by executions, concurrency and events; self-hostable. · paid from $99/mo | Server free to self-host (MIT); Temporal Cloud is pay-as-you-go from $50 per million actions plus storage, with $150 in free credits for 90 days. · paid from $50 per 1M actions |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes · self-hostable | Yes · self-hostable |
| Incidents, 90 daysfrom its status page | 16 (8 major) | 34 (3 major) |
Cost as you grow
At 10 thousand runs Inngest costs less ($0 vs $0.55); from about 100 thousand runs Temporal does ($5.50 vs $99); from about 10k thousand runs Inngest does ($424 vs $550). They're different kinds of tool — hosted job platform and durable workflow engine — so the prices don't buy the same thing.
The numbers, plan by plan
| Job runs or steps per month | Inngest | Temporal |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | $0 Free | $0.55 Developer (pay as you go) |
| 50 | $0 Free | $2.75 Developer (pay as you go) |
| 100 | $99 Pro | $5.50 Developer (pay as you go) |
| 500 | $99 Pro | $28 Developer (pay as you go) |
| 1,000 | $99 Pro | $55 Developer (pay as you go) |
| 5,000 | $299 Pro | $275 Developer (pay as you go) |
| 10,000 | $424 Pro | $550 Developer (pay as you go) |
What makers say
Makers on using it for background jobs & cron, from Product Hunt and Starter Story interviews, each linked to the source. Products with a page of their own and fuller notes first.
On InngestWe also hosted our own Redis-based queue before managing events infra became a job in itself. Inngest has top tier local dev DX and helps our background jobs scale infinitely.
All of our async operations run on Inngest. They have the best DX. Super simple to do debouncing, throttling, fanning out, and more. Easy to test in local, and easy to monitor in production.
Inngest's queuing system is a fantastic improvement over managing queues ourselves - it frees up time so we can spend talking to more customers instead.
On TemporalIt powers our multi-step workflows across agent actions. Temporal gives us durability, visibility, and precise control. Battle-tested orchestration with strong developer UX.
Temporal is like React for asynchronous and scheduled tasks. It lets us build complex workflows with confidence and resilience, making sure they work perfectly every time.
Temporal gave us incredibly good reliability and cold/warm start times - we're able to start threads in well under a second thanks to it and Modal.
Loved and watch-outs
Themes that recur in makers' words and Hacker News comments, each linked to what it summarises.
Inngest- It replaces a self-hosted Redis queue and workers, so teams stop running event infrastructure themselves. PHPH 2
- Workflows can be tested locally, and production runs come with tracing and monitoring built in. PHPH 2inngest.com
- Debouncing, throttling and fan-out are simple, making complex multi-step flows such as AI agents quick to build. PHinngest.com
Temporal- Durable workflows survive retries, timeouts, crashes and deploys, replacing fragile stacks of queues, timers and cron jobs. PHPH 2PH 3HN
- Retries and compensating actions are handled by the platform, so application code describes business logic rather than failure handling. HNHN 2HN 3PH
- It is mature and battle-tested, reliably finishing workflows that sleep for months. HNHN 2HN 3PH
Who uses each
Inngest16 makers' products
Cloudglue
FirstQuadrant
North
Productlane
QA.tech
SaveIt.now
Studio
Vybe
Atlas
Breyta.ai
Finyuus
Hoplite
Julep AI
Offloop
Speakeasy
VeloWhat makers pair each with
With Inngest
Featurebase
Runway
SEOPulserWith Temporal
Central
Flexprice
RunLLM
Slashy
Human Behavior
PostizUnify
Calendly
Fillout
Replit
Retool
SendGridRunLLMSlashyHuman Behavior
KindeNeither quite right?
See the whole background jobs & cron decision →
Trigger.devHosted job platformLong-running TypeScript tasks — AI calls, media processing — that would time out in a serverless function.vs Inngest →vs Temporal →
UpstashServerless queueSimple scheduled calls and delayed HTTP jobs on serverless or edge hosting, via QStash.
BullMQSelf-run queueNode apps on a long-running server that already have Redis — free and fully in your control.