Inngest review: Open source durable execution for background jobs, workflows and AI agents

What Inngest does

Runs your background jobs, workflows and AI agents as durable step functions with automatic retries, flow control and tracing, without your own queue.

Inngest is an open source SDK that lets developers run asynchronous code reliably. You wrap pieces of your existing code in steps, and the platform takes care of retries, saved state and recovery from failures, so there is no separate queue or broker to operate. It targets event-driven workflows, background jobs, scheduled and cron jobs, webhook handling and AI agents.

Beyond retries, the vendor describes flow control for situations where many users compete for the same resource, tracing of each job from trigger to completion, sandboxes for trying a new prompt, model or code path away from production traffic, and scoring so variants can be compared. A local dev server can be started with a single command, and quickstarts are listed for TypeScript with Next.js or Node.js and for Python with FastAPI. Security items on the homepage include SOC 2, SSO and SAML, and a HIPAA BAA.

Pricing is freemium. The Free plan costs $0 per month, needs no credit card and includes 5 seats and 50k executions. Pro starts at $99 per month with 15 seats, and Business starts at $499 per month with 30 seats. Enterprise is custom and handled through the sales team. Usage beyond included amounts is billed separately: on Pro, executions past the included amount cost $50 per 1m, and extra seats cost $10 per seat. Advanced observability and HIPAA are paid add-ons. The pages also state that the engine can be self-hosted.

• Automatic retries and recovery
• Step-based durable functions
• Flow control for competing users
• Step-level tracing
• Scheduled and cron jobs
• Isolated sandboxes
• Scoring for comparing variants
• Local dev server
• Self-hosting option

Our take

Inngest suits development teams that want retries, state and tracing for background work or AI agents without running their own queue infrastructure, and that are comfortable adding an SDK to their code. The free plan lets you try it before committing, and self-hosting is an option if you prefer to run the engine yourself. It is less suitable for people looking for a no-code tool, since everything is set up in code. Cost depends on how many steps each run has, because executions count the run plus every step, and several dimensions are billed independently, so monthly bills can vary. Estimate your own workflow before choosing a plan.