Inngest vs Better Stack
Durable functions + event-driven workflows for modern apps
vs. Observability + uptime + incident management in one — modern alternative to Datadog
Pricing tiers
Inngest
Free
$0. 50K steps/mo + 1K concurrent executions. 7-day log retention. 1 environment.
Free
OSS (self-host)
Free forever. Inngest Dev Server + self-hosted Inngest runtime. Apache 2.0.
$0 base (usage-based)
Starter
$20/mo. 250K steps/mo. 5K concurrency. 14-day retention. 3 envs.
$20/mo
Pro
$75/mo. 1M steps/mo. 10K concurrency. 30-day retention. Priority support.
$75/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SSO, HIPAA, dedicated clusters, self-host with Inngest Enterprise.
Custom
Better Stack
Pay-as-you-go
Ingest $0.15/GB, retention $0.08/GB/month. Metrics $0.75/GB/month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free
10 monitors + heartbeats, 1 status page. 3GB logs @ 3-day retention. 30GB metrics. 100K exceptions/mo. 5k session replays.
Free
Telemetry — Nano
$30/mo ($25 annual). 40 GB logs/traces/metrics. 30-day retention.
$30/mo
Responder License
$34/mo ($29 annual) per responder. Unlimited phone + SMS alerts. Required for on-call.
$34/mo
Telemetry — Micro
$120/mo. 160 GB.
$120/mo
Telemetry — Mega
$250/mo. 340 GB.
$250/mo
Telemetry — Tera
$500/mo. 700 GB.
$500/mo
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Inngest vs free on Better Stack.
| Metric | Inngest | Better Stack |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Inngest · 14 features
- AgentKit — Build AI agents as durable Inngest functions.
- Auto Retries — Configurable retries with exponential backoff.
- Concurrency Controls — Per-function and per-user concurrency limits.
- Cron Triggers — Scheduled functions via cron syntax.
- Debounce — Coalesce rapid-fire events into one execution.
- Dev Server — Local Inngest runtime for dev.
- Durable Steps — step.run, step.sleep, step.waitForEvent.
- Event System — Typed events with schemas.
- Fan Out / Batching — Process many events in parallel with batch control.
- Priority Lanes — Route premium customers to faster execution.
- Rate Limiting — Throttle events per key.
- Realtime — Stream function output to clients.
- Replay — Re-run past functions with new code.
- Self-Host — OSS runtime — run your own Inngest.
Better Stack · 13 features
- Dashboards — SQL + chart-based dashboards.
- Distributed Tracing — OpenTelemetry traces with span analysis.
- Error Tracking — Sentry-style error capture per $0.000075/exception.
- Heartbeats (Cron) — Dead-man-switch style alerts for cron/scheduled jobs.
- Logs (formerly Logtail) — Centralized structured logging with live tail + SQL.
- Metrics — Prometheus-compatible metrics ingest + visualization.
- On-Call & Incidents — Schedules, escalations, incident response with postmortems.
- Phone + SMS Alerts — Unlimited phone + SMS on Responder license.
- Reporting & Analytics — +$5/member/month add-on.
- Session Replay — Integrated with error events.
- SQL Queries over Logs — ClickHouse-backed SQL on all ingested telemetry.
- Status Pages — Hosted status pages with custom domain + brandable.
- Uptime Monitoring — HTTP, keyword, ping, TCP, UDP monitors. Global checkpoints.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Inngest | Better Stack |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | inngest-cli (dev server) | — |
| SDK | inngestgo, inngest (Python), inngest (TS/Node) | logtail-ruby, pino-logtail / winston transport, python-logtail |
| REST | Inngest REST API | Better Stack REST API, Telemetry API |
| MCP | Inngest MCP | — |
| OTHER | Inngest Cloud Dashboard | OTLP (OpenTelemetry), Webhooks |
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