Hey thanks for the comparison - Temporal is a powerful tool. There are definitely similarities with what Inngest is capable of. Here are a few differences to highlight:
- We’ve taken a different approach that removes the queue and worker abstraction from the end developer and instead uses an HTTP-based invocation. This enables Inngest functions to be run on any platform, including serverless.
- Inngest is powered by events which gives developers the ability to fan out work and build event-driven flows easily.
- Inngest also allows you to coordinate across events, enabling workflows to pause and wait for additional input (step.waitForEvent [1]). This is powerful for human-in-the-middle workflows (e.g. AI confirmation flows) or workflows that pause for days or weeks and conditionally run steps depending on what a user might do in your system (e.g. dynamic email drip campaigns)
- Lastly, events also provide a nice way to easy replay of your workflows across any time window.
- One last thing is that we’ve heard many times that while devs are often quite excited about Temporal, they’ve found Inngest to be much easier to learn and build with. We’ve intentionally worked to make our first SDK with the simplest primitives so their workflows just look like normal code, with minimal DSL.
Inngest has built in concurrency controls and rate limiting to prevent systems from being overloaded, allowing the user to have the same controls of a traditional worker, but just a simple config option.
Inngest was designed to be a solution that can replace traditional queuing systems and event driven systems. Originally, it was built with the idea to handle complex flows that need to be durable, e.g. healthcare workflows that have time-based follow ups and legal compliance tasks that need to be executed in a specific order depending on patient confirmation or other actions.
We've seen users build all sorts of things: automate infrastructure based on events, building AI Agents around LLMs, perform vulnerability scans across thousands of packages, building scheduling products, and e-commerce data pipelines. We're seeing new use cases each week.
- We’ve taken a different approach that removes the queue and worker abstraction from the end developer and instead uses an HTTP-based invocation. This enables Inngest functions to be run on any platform, including serverless.
- Inngest is powered by events which gives developers the ability to fan out work and build event-driven flows easily.
- Inngest also allows you to coordinate across events, enabling workflows to pause and wait for additional input (step.waitForEvent [1]). This is powerful for human-in-the-middle workflows (e.g. AI confirmation flows) or workflows that pause for days or weeks and conditionally run steps depending on what a user might do in your system (e.g. dynamic email drip campaigns)
- Lastly, events also provide a nice way to easy replay of your workflows across any time window.
- One last thing is that we’ve heard many times that while devs are often quite excited about Temporal, they’ve found Inngest to be much easier to learn and build with. We’ve intentionally worked to make our first SDK with the simplest primitives so their workflows just look like normal code, with minimal DSL.
[1] https://www.inngest.com/docs/reference/functions/step-wait-f...