Inngest

Durable functions on your existing infrastructure — event-driven workflows with steps, sleeps, and flow control.

What is Inngest?

Inngest brings durable execution to ordinary serverless and server apps: you write functions composed of steps, and Inngest orchestrates them — each step retries independently, state persists between steps, and functions can sleep for days or wait for events without holding compute. Critically, your code keeps running on your own infrastructure (Vercel, Lambda, containers); Inngest calls into it, which means adoption requires no platform migration. The event-driven model (send events, fan out to functions) plus production-grade flow control — concurrency keys, throttling, debouncing, priority — makes it particularly strong for multi-tenant SaaS and AI workloads where one customer's burst must not starve others. SDKs cover TypeScript, Python, and Go, with a local dev server for testing. A free tier and usage-based pricing keep entry friction low; the open question for some teams is depending on a proprietary orchestrator, which its self-hostable dev tooling only partly answers.

Key Features

Durable step functions: independent retries and persisted state

sleep/waitForEvent for days-long workflows without compute

Flow control: concurrency keys, throttle, debounce, priority

Runs on your existing infra — Vercel, Lambda, containers

TypeScript, Python, and Go SDKs with a local dev server

Use Cases

AI agent pipelines with retryable steps and human pauses
Multi-tenant job fairness via per-customer concurrency keys
Event-driven fan-out across services
Drip campaigns and workflows that sleep between actions

How to Use Inngest

1Install the SDK and define functions with steps
2Serve them via an HTTP endpoint in your app
3Send events to trigger functions; steps execute durably
4Observe runs, retries, and traces in the dashboard

Best For

Teams wanting durable workflows without new infrastructureMulti-tenant SaaS needing per-tenant flow controlEvent-driven architectures across multiple services

FAQ

Is Inngest free?

There's a free tier with monthly run allowances for development and small apps. Paid plans are usage-based on function runs and steps, scaling with volume.

Does my code run on Inngest's servers?

No — that's the key design. Inngest orchestrates by calling functions served from your own infrastructure (Vercel, Lambda, your servers), so data and execution stay with you.

Inngest or Temporal?

Temporal offers maximal control for engineering teams ready to operate workers and learn its model; Inngest trades some of that power for dramatically lower adoption cost on serverless stacks.

Looking for Inngest alternatives?

Compare 2 hand-picked alternatives by pricing, free plans, and open-source availability.

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Inngest vs Trigger.dev

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