Inngest

Durable workflows for serverless

Background job and durable workflow platform built for serverless environments like Next.js and Vercel.

Our take

Inngest is the developer-friendly durable workflow platform built for serverless environments — a direct alternative to Temporal's complexity for teams that want reliable background jobs in Next.js, Vercel, or AWS Lambda without operating a separate workflow orchestration cluster. The core model is elegant: write a regular function, wrap it with Inngest's SDK, and it becomes a durable multi-step workflow with automatic retries, state persistence, and event-driven coordination — no separate infrastructure. The developer experience on Vercel/Next.js is the best available — deploy a function, Inngest handles the rest. The comparison with Temporal: Temporal is more powerful (custom retry policies, activity timeouts, complex workflow patterns) but requires running a Temporal cluster or using Temporal Cloud at $25/month. Inngest handles 90% of background job use cases with zero infrastructure. Teams that need workflow features Inngest doesn't support (very long-running workflows, complex state machines) should evaluate Temporal.

Product roadmap

Inngest is expanding its workflow capabilities (more complex branching, longer workflow durations), building native integrations with major serverless platforms, and adding AI workflow primitives (LLM call retries, token budget management). The shift to serverless-native architectures is driving adoption.