Inngest

Inngest gives you durable, event-driven workflows with TypeScript or Python and zero infrastructure to manage. The right pick for AI agent backends, background jobs, and anything that "has to finish, eventually."

Inngest hits a sweet spot that's hard to find. Vercel cron and BullMQ work for simple background jobs but fall over once you need durability across crashes. Temporal is the right answer for serious workflow orchestration but requires operating a substantial stack. Inngest gives you Temporal-style durability — functions that survive crashes mid-step, automatic retries, sleep/sleepUntil/waitForEvent primitives — through a developer SDK that runs on top of any compute (Vercel, AWS Lambda, your own servers).

The killer feature for AI teams is the multi-step function model. Long-running agent workflows (research → analyze → draft → review → publish) become straightforward: each step is durable, retries on failure, and the dev server gives you visual debugging of in-flight runs. The Inngest team has leaned into AI agent use cases hard and the documentation reflects that.

The limits are price-at-scale and the standard "third-party orchestration" risk. The Pro tier ($300/mo) covers most production needs but heavy users will negotiate enterprise. If your workflow scale or compliance posture really requires self-hosted Temporal, Inngest isn't the answer. For everyone else — buy it. Building durable workflow execution yourself is one of the most expensive infrastructure mistakes a startup can make.