Inngest vs Temporal: Durable execution that developers love

Why devs choose Inngest over Temporal.

No workers

Zero infrastructure to deploy

Inngest calls your existing HTTP server – no worker processes, no queue confir, no ops surface to maintain.

Built for AI

Built for how agents actually fail

Step memorization, human-in-the-loop, and per-LLM-call observability – first-class, not bolted on.

Any runtime

TypeScript, Python, Go – or anything with HTTP

Temporal’s strongest, SDK is Go, Inngest treats every language as a first-class citizen.

Eliminating Temporal's infrastructure tax.

Quick start guide →Browse the docs

Temporal

Temporal requires workers as a deployment unit. Temporal puts a server, a database, and worker processes in your cloud before you write a line of business logic.

activities.ts

export async function getUser(userId: string) {
  const user = await db.getUser(userId);
  if (!user) {
    throw InvalidAccountError('User not found');
  }
  return user;
}
export async function sendWelcomeEmail(email: string) {
  // ...
}
export async function startTrial(userId: string) {
  // ...
}

workflow.ts

import { proxyActivities } from '@temporalio/workflow';
import { ApplicationFailure } from '@temporalio/common';

export async function welcomeWorkflow(
  userSignup: { id: string }
) {
  const {
    getUser,
    sendWelcomeEmail,
    startTrial
  } = proxyActivities<typeof activities>({
    retry: {
      initialInterval: '1 second',
      maximumInterval: '1 minute',
      backoffCoefficient: 2,
      maximumAttempts: 4,
      nonRetryableErrorTypes: ['InvalidAccountError'],
    },
    startToCloseTimeout: '1 minute',
  });

  const user = await getUser(userSignup.id);

  await sendWelcomeEmail(user.email);

  try {
    await startTrial(user.id);
  } catch (e) {
    throw ApplicationFailure.create({
      message: 'Failed to start trial'
    });
  }

  return 'Workflow complete';
}

worker.ts

import { Worker } from '@temporalio/worker';
import * as activities from './activities';
import { namespace, taskQueueName } from './shared';

async function run() {
  // Workflows are loaded from the workflowsPath
  // which modifies the code at runtime
  const worker = await Worker.create({
    workflowsPath: require.resolve('./workflows'),
    activities,
    namespace: 'acme-app',
    taskQueue: 'user-workflows',
  });

  await worker.run();
}

run().catch((err) => {
  console.error(err);
  process.exit(1);
});

Inngest

Inngest calls your existing HTTP endpoints – no new infrastructure, no separate deployment pipeline.

workflows.ts

import { Inngest, NonRetriableError } from 'inngest';

export const inngest = new Inngest({
  id: 'acme-app',
});

export const welcomeWorkflow = inngest.createFunction(
  { id: 'welcome-workflow', retries: 4 },
  { event: 'user.signup'},
  async ({ event, step }) => {
    const user = await step.run('get-user', async () => {
      const user = await db.getUser(userId);
      if (!user) {
        throw NonRetriableError('User not found');
      }
      return user;
    });

    await step.run('send-welcome-email', async () => {
      await sendWelcomeEmail(user.email);
    });

    await step.run('start-trial', async () => {
      await startTrial(user.id);
    });

    return 'Workflow complete';
  }
)

server.ts

import { serve } from 'inngest/express';
import { inngest, welcomeWorkflow } from './workflows';

app.use('/api/inngest', serve({
  client: inngest,
  functions: [welcomeWorkflow]
}));

app.listen(3000);

Side by side feature comparison.

Quick start guide →Browse the docs

Feature

Temporal

Inngest

Time to first execution

Hours to days – provision workers, server, and database first

Minutes – npx inngest-cli@latest dev and wrap an existing function

Multi-step execution

Workflows + Activities – their terms for functions & steps

step.run() – plain async, automatic persistence (Temporal calls these Activities)

Fan-out / Parallel Steps

Parallel activity execution

promise.all over step.run()

Scheduled / Cron

Cron schedules

Native cron trigger (Temporal: Schedules)

SDK ergonomics

Determinism rules add cognitive hoverhead; Go SKD most mature

Plain async/await — no determinism constraints

Language support

Go, Java, TypeScript, Python – Go SKD significantly ahead; Java unique to Temporal

TypeScript, Python, Go — any HTTP runtime

Step memoization

Activity results are cached, but retries re-run the whole activity

Completed steps never re-run on retry

Human-in-the-loop

Signals — Temporal’s term for what Inngest calls waitForEvent

step.waitForEvent() — native primitive (Temporal calls these Signals)

Durable HTTP endpoints

Not supported

Durability for real-time / streaming agent calls

Step-level traces

Event History (Temporal’s term) — workflow-level, less granular per step

Every step timed and inspectable in the dashboard

Queue delay vs. execution time

Not broken out natively — custom instrumentation needed

Surfaced separately per run

Bulk replay

Workflow reset (Temporal’s term) — per-workflow via CLI, no bulk UI

Re-run failed functions in bulk from the dashboard

Per-key concurrency

Task queues — Temporal’s term; sized at worker level, not per-key

One line of function config

Rate limiting

No built-in rate limiting — requires custom implementation

Built-in, per function or per user

Debouncing

No native debouncing — achievable with custom signal/timer logic

Native

Designed for AI, not retrofitted.

Temporal was architected for deterministic workflows.
The primitives it exposes reflect that – and so do the gaps.

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const summary = await
step.run('summarize', async () => {
return llm.complete(transcript) })
// On retry, this step is skipped.
// The LLM is not called again.

Teams that chose Inngest over Temporal.

Inngest completely transformed how we handle AI orchestration at Cohere. Its intuitive developer experience, built-in multi-tenant concurrency, and flow control allowed us to scale without the complexity of other tools or the need to build custom solutions. What would have taken us a month.

Sully Omar

Co-Founder - Cohere

View case study View all

Built for mission-critical infrastructure.

SOC 2 Compliant
HIPAA BAA Available
E2E Encryption
100k+ Executions/Sec
SSO & SAML
Low Latency

For individuals and teams

Start building in minutes

Connect to your existing codebase. No credit card, no workers, no infrastructure to provision.

Start building free

No credit card • Instant access • Free Tier

For enterprise teams

Talk to our team

Migration support, custom SLAs, SS, HIPPA BAA, and a solution scoped to your architecture.

Migration from Temporal support
Custom SLAs & uptime guarantees
SOC2, HIPPA BAA, SSO & SAML
Dedicated onboarding & support

Enterprise companies that use Inngest:

Talk to us

Usually responds within 1 business day

FAQ

Inngest orchestrates AI workflows by invoking your functions via HTTP between steps. You write workflows as normal async functions and wrap logic in step.run(). Inngest handles retry logic, state, and scheduling between steps — no extra queues, workers, or stateful backends required.
Quick-start guide
No. This is a common misconception based on how easy Inngest is to get started with. Ease of setup is a product decision, not a capacity ceiling. Inngest runs production workloads at companies processing millions of events daily. Small teams ship faster with it. Large teams don't outgrow it.
Partially. Temporal Cloud removes the need to self-host the Temporal cluster, but you still run and manage your own worker fleet — the processes that pull and execute your workflows. With Inngest, there are no workers to run at all. Your existing deployment is the worker. Inngest invokes your functions via HTTP.
Yes. Inngest is open-source and can be self-hosted. The cloud product adds managed infrastructure, observability, and reliability on top — but the core engine is yours to run.
Temporal has been around longer and targets a different audience — large engineering teams with dedicated platform engineers who can manage distributed worker infrastructure. Inngest is newer and optimized for teams who want durable execution without that operational overhead. Stars reflect history and audience, not fit for your use case.
Yes. The core concepts map directly: Temporal Workflows become Inngest functions, Activities become step.run() calls. The main shift is architectural — you stop running workers and let Inngest invoke your existing deployment instead. Most teams migrate incrementally, running both in parallel during the transition.
Temporal Cloud starts at $100/month plus the cost of running your own worker fleet — compute, scaling, and maintenance. Inngest starts at $75/month with no workers to run. At scale, the more meaningful difference is operational cost: Inngest removes an entire infrastructure layer that Temporal requires you to manage.
Temporal's execution model requires workflow code to be strictly deterministic — it replays history to reconstruct state after failures. LLMs are inherently non-deterministic, which means you have to carefully isolate every model call inside an Activity to prevent replay errors. Inngest was architected around steps from the start, with no determinism requirement on the orchestration layer. Every LLM call is naturally a step. There's no replay model to design around, no risk of non-deterministic code causing execution failures, and no mental overhead separating "workflow code" from "activity code." For AI, that's a meaningful difference.

The developer experience Temporal wishes it had.