| Product | Inngest |
| Website | inngest.com |
| Category | Workflow Orchestration / Background Jobs |
| Pricing | Free tier, Pro from $50/mo |
What Is Inngest?
Inngest is a durable execution platform for serverless functions. It lets you write multi-step workflows, background jobs, and scheduled tasks that survive failures, retries, and deployments. You write a function with step.run() calls, and Inngest handles execution, retries, concurrency, and state management.
The problem it solves: serverless functions are ephemeral. They time out, they don’t retry cleanly, and there’s no built-in way to coordinate multi-step workflows. Inngest adds durability to serverless: each step’s result is persisted, so if a later step fails, the function resumes from where it left off without re-running completed steps.
Key Features
Durable Steps
Each step.run() is a checkpoint. If the function crashes after step 3, it resumes from step 4 when retried. Completed steps return their cached results instantly. This means you can write long-running workflows (send email, wait 3 days, check status, send reminder) as a single function.
Event-Driven
Functions trigger on events. Send an event (inngest.send({name: "user/signup", data: {...}})) and every function that listens for that event runs. Multiple functions can react to the same event, enabling fan-out patterns without manual pub/sub infrastructure.
Concurrency and Rate Limiting
Configure concurrency limits per function, per user, or per any custom key. Rate limiting prevents overwhelming external APIs. Throttling batches events together. These controls are declared in the function definition, not managed through infrastructure.
Scheduling
Schedule functions with cron expressions. The scheduled function runs on Inngest’s infrastructure with the same durability guarantees as event-triggered functions. Use it for daily reports, hourly sync jobs, and periodic cleanup tasks.
Who Is This For?
- Teams running serverless applications that need reliable background processing
- Anyone building multi-step workflows (onboarding sequences, data pipelines)
- Developers who need event-driven architecture without managing queues
- Applications that call external APIs and need retry logic and rate limiting
Pros
- Durable execution with automatic retries
- Multi-step workflows as single functions
- Event-driven with fan-out
- Concurrency, throttling, and rate limiting built in
- Works with any serverless platform
- Local dev server for testing
Cons
- Step-based model has a learning curve
- Debugging multi-step functions is more complex
- Pro tier required for higher concurrency
- Newer platform (less enterprise adoption)
- Self-hosting is possible but less documented
Verdict
Inngest solves the reliability problem of serverless. The durable step model means functions that call external APIs, send notifications, and process data in multiple stages just work — failures are retried from the right point, completed steps aren’t repeated, and the whole workflow is observable in the dashboard.
For teams building on Vercel, Netlify, or any serverless platform, Inngest replaces the queue infrastructure (SQS, BullMQ, Celery) that you’d otherwise need to manage. The trade-off is a different programming model: step.run() instead of sequential code. Once internalized, it’s more reliable than the alternative.