Inngest vs Temporal: Which Durable Workflow Tool Wins

Inngest vs Temporal comes down to who runs your code. Temporal wins when you need the strictest durable execution and the deepest scheduling, and you're willing to host workers. Inngest wins when you want durable steps inside normal functions, with no worker process to keep alive.

Both are good tools. They make different bets about where your code lives, and that bet decides most of what follows: what you deploy, what you pay, and what breaks at 3am. There's also a third case neither is built for, which we cover at the end. We build Omniyond, a hosted HTTP scheduler, so we're not neutral on that one.

Prices below were checked on 5 November 2026. Vendor pages move, so check them before you commit.

Inngest vs Temporal side by side

Where Temporal wins

Temporal is among the most rigorous durable execution engines you can buy or self-host, and it has the production history to back that up. If correctness after a crash is the main requirement, it's the default answer.

Its scheduling is also deeper than anything else here. Temporal's Schedule Spec takes calendar expressions with ranges, lists and wildcards on every field, plus a timezone, so "every weekday at 09:00 New York" is one spec. It has an overlap policy that decides what happens when a run is still going and the next one is due. It has a catchup window, so fires missed during an outage aren't silently dropped. Backfill and pause are built in.

Then there's resume-from-crash. A workflow's state is rebuilt from its event history, so if a worker dies halfway through a ten-step process, another worker picks up at step six, not step one. Add signals, queries and versioning, and you have a platform for workflows that run for weeks or months without losing their place.

The cost is the worker, and it's worth saying plainly: Temporal never runs your code. Per Temporal's docs, workers run in your environment and poll task queues. That's the right design for keeping your secrets and compute yours. It also means that in every Temporal setup, Cloud or self-hosted, your code still runs in workers you deploy (long-running processes, or serverless workers on Cloud), and you monitor and pay for them. Cloud pay-as-you-go has no base fee: actions cost $50 per million, Developer support adds 10% of usage, and new accounts get $150 in credits for 90 days. The worker host is the bill that doesn't show up on it.

Where Inngest wins

Inngest's pitch is that you write normal functions and get durability without running infrastructure. You add the SDK, wrap the parts that must not repeat in step.run(), and serve the functions from the app you already deploy. Inngest calls them over HTTP, checkpoints each step, and resumes from the last good one after a failure. There's no separate worker host and no task queue for you to keep open.

On serverless, a long-lived Temporal worker is an architectural change. Inngest slots into what you have.

Events are the other strength. Functions trigger from events, fan out across many items, and use flow control (concurrency limits, throttling, debouncing, batching), then wait for the fan-out to finish before the next step. Step-level traces make long functions debuggable. And Inngest's MCP server lets a coding agent list, invoke and inspect the functions you've deployed.

The walls, plainly. The free tier gives you 50,000 executions a month, 5 concurrent steps and 24 hours of traces, and executions count every step, not every run. When the quota runs out, execution pauses until you upgrade. The next plan is $99/month Pro (1M executions, 100+ concurrent steps, 7-day traces), with nothing in between. That's a fair price for a team whose workflows are product infrastructure. It's a steep floor for one background job, which we dig into in Omniyond vs Inngest.

When neither fits

A lot of people comparing Inngest vs Temporal don't have a workflow. They have one outbound HTTP call that needs to happen on a timer: hit a webhook every hour, send a digest each morning, poll an API every 15 minutes, ping an endpoint once in three days. No branching, no state between steps, nothing to resume.

For that, both are overkill in different ways. Temporal asks you to run a worker whose only job is to make one request. Inngest asks you to adopt its SDK and, past the free tier, a $99 floor. What you want is a hosted HTTP scheduler: the schedule is a row in someone else's database, created with one POST, and the fire is a request to a URL you already have. We go through the Temporal side of this in a Temporal alternative for simple scheduling, and the wider field in Inngest alternatives.

We build Omniyond, which is one of these, so weigh this part accordingly. You send a URL and run it once or on an interval, and it makes the call for $0.01 a run. Failed calls retry after 30 seconds, 5 minutes and 30 minutes, then the job is marked failed and you get an email. The response is stored for you to fetch or POSTed to a callback. There's no SDK and no subscription, and the MCP server lets an agent create a job for any URL as a tool call, which is the case we cover in cron for AI agents.

The limits are large next to either tool here. Recurrence is interval-only, from 5 minutes to 90 days: no cron expressions, no calendar specs, no timezones, so "every weekday at 09:00" isn't expressible. There are no steps, no state, no overlap policy, no catchup and no fan-out, and Omniyond is young, with none of Temporal's production history. If your job needs any of that, pick Temporal or Inngest. And if you already run a Temporal worker, it's cheaper per run too: a few actions at $50 per million is a fraction of a cent.

So which one wins?

Neither, in the abstract. Pick by where your code lives and how much the work must survive:

• Correctness-critical or long-running workflows, calendar schedules with timezones, and you're fine running workers: Temporal.
• Durable steps and events inside an app you already deploy, no worker to host, and the $99 floor is fine once you outgrow free: Inngest.
• One HTTP call on a timer, with no state: a hosted scheduler.

FAQ

Inngest vs Temporal: which should I pick?

Temporal if correctness after a crash is the main requirement, workflows run for weeks, or you need calendar schedules with timezones and overlap control, and you're fine hosting workers. Inngest if you want durable steps in normal functions inside an app you already deploy, with events and fan-out and no worker process.

Does Temporal require a worker?

Yes. Temporal Cloud and the self-hosted server orchestrate, but your workflow and activity code always runs in workers you host, polling task queues. Even a single scheduled HTTP call needs a worker you deploy.

What is Inngest's pricing floor after free?

$99/month for Pro, which includes 1M executions, 100+ concurrent steps and 7-day traces. There's no plan between free and Pro, and the free tier's 50,000 executions a month (counted per step) and 5 concurrent steps are what usually push people there.

Inngest vs Hatchet?

Hatchet is an open source, Postgres-backed durable task queue where you run the workers, so it's closer to Temporal's shape than Inngest's. Its pay-as-you-go plan includes 1M runs and 1M events free each month, then $30 per million runs and $5 per million events. More in Inngest alternatives.

Can either replace a simple cron or HTTP schedule?

Yes, but it's usually overkill. Temporal needs a worker you deploy to make one request, and Inngest needs its SDK in your app and, past the free tier, $99 a month. For one call on a timer, see a Temporal alternative for simple scheduling and Inngest alternatives.