What's the difference between Inngest and Temporal?

Inngest vs Temporal: Direct Comparison

Inngest (2021, San Francisco) and Temporal (2019) both deliver durable execution semantics but target different audiences and ship different programming models.

Programming Model

Inngest expresses durable functions as event-driven step graphs. Each step.run, step.sleep, step.waitForEvent, and step.sendEvent call is independently retryable and checkpointed. Code lives next to the application and runs over HTTP from the Inngest runtime.

Temporal expresses workflows as long-running deterministic functions that orchestrate activities. The SDK preserves execution state through deterministic replay. SDKs are available for Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, .NET, PHP, and Ruby.

Pricing (May 2026)

• Inngest: Free 50K step runs/month; Hobby $20/month for 200K steps; Pro $50-$500/month tiers
• Temporal Cloud: Standard from ~$200/month at low volume, $25/M Actions; Mission Critical 2x consumption at 99.95% SLA
• Temporal self-host: Apache 2.0 license, realistic infrastructure cost $2,500-$4,500/month plus operational labor

Scale Ceiling

Temporal scales horizontally on Cassandra to tens of millions of concurrent workflow executions. Inngest production deployments routinely handle multi-million step runs but the public ceiling is lower than Temporal's. Below 50M step runs/month the distinction is academic.

Operational Footprint

Temporal self-host requires Cassandra plus Temporal services plus Elasticsearch (optional). Temporal Cloud removes that footprint at consumption pricing. Inngest cloud is fully managed; the OSS dev server is for local development only.

When Each Wins

Inngest wins for TypeScript and Python application teams below 50M step runs/month with a managed-cloud preference. Temporal wins for polyglot SDK requirements (Java, Go, .NET), very high scale (100M+ Actions/month), or compliance-driven self-host on the team's own infrastructure.

For deeper analysis, see the Inngest vs Temporal 2026 comparison guide.