Inngest vs Temporal
Compare Inngest and Temporal on pricing, free tier, open source, API, self-host, verdict and momentum.
Both are dev-infra tools. Inngest is freemium (free Hobby tier; Pro $99/mo) with an API, self-hostable, a free tier; Temporal is freemium (Open-source self-hosted under MIT license is free; Temporal Cloud starts at $100/mo Essentials and offers $1,000 in free credits.) with open source, an API, self-hostable and a free tier. The catalog stamp is ship for Inngest and situational for Temporal, last verified 2026-08-19 and 2026-08-19 respectively.
Inngest
Durable workflows and event-driven functions for serverless apps.
Temporal
Durable workflow orchestration engine, open-source and cloud-hosted, popular for reliable AI agent pipelines.
| field | Inngest | Temporal |
|---|---|---|
| pricing | freemium · free Hobby tier; Pro $99/mo | freemium · Open-source self-hosted under MIT license is free; Temporal Cloud starts at $100/mo Essentials and offers $1,000 in free credits. |
| free tier | yes | yes |
| open source | no | yes |
| api | yes | yes |
| self-host | yes | yes |
| verdict | ship | situational |
| momentum | steady | blueshift |
| last verified | 2026-08-19 | 2026-08-19 |
| key limitation | The server and CLI use SSPL with delayed Apache-2.0 conversion, not an OSI open-source license today. | There is a learning curve: workers, workflows, activities, and event history are new concepts for many teams. |
The call
Pick Inngest — we ship it; Temporal is situational for us.
Pick Temporal if open source matters.
Inngest sources
Temporal sources
Open live compare →Inngest pageTemporal pageInngest.jsonTemporal.json