Temporal vs Inngest

Temporal

Inngest

Temporal · 16 features

• Activities — Retryable units of work.
• Activity Retries — Declarative retry policies.
• Child Workflows — Nested workflow composition.
• Continue-As-New — Close + restart workflow to prune history.
• Nexus (cross-namespace) — Call workflows across namespaces/teams.
• Queries — Synchronous read of workflow state.
• Saga / Compensations — Rollback pattern via compensating activities.
• Schedules — Cron-like recurring workflows.
• Self-Host — Deploy cluster on your infra.
• Signals — Async messages into a running workflow.
• Timers — Durable sleeps — hours, days, months.
• Update — Synchronous RPC into workflow with validation.
• Visibility + Search Attrs — Query workflow state via Elasticsearch/native store.
• Web UI — Inspect workflow history, events, stack.
• Workflows — Durable, replayable, long-running functions.
• Workflow Versioning — Patch workflow code without breaking in-flight runs.

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.