Alternatives

Trigger.dev alternatives for background jobs and agent tasks

The closest Trigger.dev alternative is Inngest, which does the same durable execution job but runs on compute you already operate; QStash covers simple scheduled and retried HTTP calls at a much lower price; and Hooksbase handles the separate problem of getting the event there reliably, which is why it is more often run in front of Trigger.dev than instead of it.

Pricing and capability claims verified as of 2026-08 from public pricing pages and documentation. Hooksbase is one of the options below — it is our product, and its limitations are listed alongside everyone else's.

How to compare Trigger.dev alternatives

Whether you need execution or delivery

Durable execution keeps a multi-step process alive across failures. Event delivery gets the event to whatever runs it, intact and exactly once as far as the consumer can tell. Most confusion in this category comes from treating those as the same requirement.

Who runs the compute

Trigger.dev runs tasks on its own infrastructure; Inngest runs them on yours. That decides who handles scaling, who pays for idle, and how a long-running task is absorbed — usually a larger practical difference than any feature comparison.

How predictable the bill is

Stacked pricing — a plan fee, a per-run invocation charge, and per-second compute — tracks usage closely and is correspondingly hard to forecast. Flat tiers trade some efficiency for a number you can put in a budget.

How the event gets there in the first place

Every option here assumes an event arrives over HTTP and is genuine. If it arrives by email or form, or comes from a provider whose signature must be verified before you act on it, that layer sits in front and none of these cover it.

What is Trigger.dev?

Trigger.dev is a managed durable task engine for long-running background work. You write tasks as ordinary code in your own repository, and Trigger.dev runs them in isolated containers with no timeout ceiling, retrying and resuming across failures, alongside concurrency limits, scheduled runs, and a realtime channel that reports progress back to your frontend.

Trigger.dev key features

• Durable tasks with no timeout limit, running for hours if needed
• Managed elastic compute rather than your own infrastructure
• Realtime run status streamed back to your frontend
• Human-in-the-loop waitpoints for agent workflows
• Apache 2.0 open source with a self-hostable build

Trigger.dev advantages

• No task timeout, which matters when an agent run takes hours
• Compute is managed and scales elastically, so there is nothing to operate
• Strong agent primitives including waitpoints and realtime connections
• A TypeScript-native developer experience with a real community behind it

Trigger.dev disadvantages

• It executes work rather than moving events — it is not a delivery network
• No ingest channels beyond an HTTP trigger, and no signature verification on the way in
• No typed outbound to SQS or EventBridge, and no outbound signing or idempotency
• Base fee plus per-run plus per-second compute is harder to forecast than a flat tier

Trigger.dev alternatives

Best for durable multi-step workflows on your own compute: Inngest

A durable execution engine. You write a workflow as steps in your own code and Inngest runs it so state survives failure — a run that dies partway resumes from the last completed step rather than starting over.

Where it is strong: A genuinely strong durable workflow model with step-level retry rather than full re-run, excellent TypeScript DX, concurrency and throttling controls, and it runs on compute you already have.
Where it falls short: It is not an ingest or delivery network. HTTP webhooks trigger it, but there are no email, form, or scheduled ingest channels, no typed outbound to SQS or EventBridge, no outbound signing, and its replay is execution retry rather than deterministic replay from a stored payload.
Pricing: Hobby free at 50,000 executions a month with 5 concurrent, Pro from $99/mo with 1M executions and pay-as-you-go to 20M, Enterprise custom.

Hooksbase vs Inngest, head to head

Best for multi-channel ingest feeding an AI agent: Hooksbase

Our product

Event infrastructure for AI agents. Accepts events over HTTP, inbound email, HTML form post, and scheduled cron, verifies provider signatures on the way in, routes and transforms them, and delivers to HTTP or typed cloud destinations with retries, ordering, signing, deterministic replay, and a dead-letter path.

Where it is strong: Four ingest channels in one project rather than HTTP alone, provider-verified inbound for Stripe, GitHub, Clerk, Slack, and Resend, typed outbound to SQS, EventBridge, Pub/Sub, and S3-compatible storage from Pro, and replay that reads persisted snapshots so a replay re-sends what was originally dispatched.
Where it falls short: It is not an execution engine — there is no durable multi-step workflow, and no topic fan-out to many subscribers, since routing selects one destination per delivery. It is hosted-only with no self-hosted build, and it is a young product without the enterprise compliance surface Svix carries.
Pricing: Free at 5,000 deliveries a month with no card. Starter $25/mo, Pro $79/mo, Business, and Enterprise. Flat tiers — retries are not billed as additional messages.

Best for serverless scheduling and topic fan-out: Upstash QStash

A serverless message queue that speaks HTTP. Publish a message to a QStash endpoint and it handles scheduling, one-off delays, retries, topic fan-out to multiple subscribers, and a dead-letter path with no queue infrastructure of your own.

Where it is strong: Scales to zero, which suits bursty and low-volume work, integrates naturally with Vercel and Cloudflare, and offers topic fan-out that most alternatives here do not.
Where it falls short: Retries are billed as separate messages, so a flaky destination costs more the worse it behaves. There is no payload persistence, no replay from stored payload, no delivery history interface, and no signature verification on ingest — it is a queue that posts to URLs.
Pricing: Free to 1,000 messages a day, then $1 per 100K, with fixed plans at $180/mo and $420/mo. Every delivery attempt is billed as a message, including each retry.

Hooksbase vs Upstash QStash, head to head

Best when the requirements are genuinely narrow and stay that way: Building it yourself

A queue, a worker, and a retry loop on infrastructure you already run — Cloudflare Queues, SQS with a Lambda, or a Postgres-backed job table.

Where it is strong: Complete control, no per-event cost, and nothing new in the vendor stack. For one provider and one consumer with no compliance requirement, this is often the correct answer.
Where it falls short: The work is not the queue, it is everything around it: signature verification per provider, idempotency, a retry budget, a dead-letter path, payload persistence, replay, and delivery history. Each is small and none is interesting, and together they become a service someone has to own.
Pricing: Infrastructure cost only, plus the engineering time to build and operate it.

Overview of Trigger.dev alternatives

Option	Best for	Pricing
Inngest	durable multi-step workflows on your own compute	Hobby free at 50,000 executions a month with 5 concurrent, Pro from $99/mo with 1M executions and pay-as-you-go to 20M, Enterprise custom.
Hooksbase	multi-channel ingest feeding an AI agent	Free at 5,000 deliveries a month with no card. Starter $25/mo, Pro $79/mo, Business, and Enterprise. Flat tiers — retries are not billed as additional messages.
Upstash QStash	serverless scheduling and topic fan-out	Free to 1,000 messages a day, then $1 per 100K, with fixed plans at $180/mo and $420/mo. Every delivery attempt is billed as a message, including each retry.
Building it yourself	the requirements are genuinely narrow and stay that way	Infrastructure cost only, plus the engineering time to build and operate it.

See it on your own events

The Hooksbase free plan covers 5,000 deliveries a month with no card. Point one event source at it and compare the delivery history against whatever you are evaluating.

Start free See the four ingest channels

Frequently asked questions

Trigger.dev alternatives, answered.

What is the best Trigger.dev alternative?

Inngest, for most teams. It solves the same durable execution problem with a strong step-level model and a similar developer experience. The main difference is where the compute runs — Inngest executes on infrastructure you already operate, which removes the per-second compute charge and adds the scaling to your plate.

Is Hooksbase a Trigger.dev alternative?

No, and it would be misleading to present it as one. Trigger.dev runs long-lived tasks as your own code with no timeout, which Hooksbase does not do. Hooksbase runs the event path that feeds them: four ingest channels, signature verification, routing, transforms, and delivery with replay and a dead-letter path. The usual arrangement is Hooksbase in front, Trigger.dev behind.

Why is Trigger.dev pricing hard to predict?

Because three things stack. There is a plan fee, a per-run invocation charge, and per-second compute billed by machine size, so cost tracks how long tasks actually run rather than how many you have. That is accurate billing, but it means the monthly number moves with workload shape, not just volume.

What does Trigger.dev not do?

It does not receive events from anywhere but an HTTP trigger, verify a provider signature before running, deliver to typed cloud destinations, sign outbound requests, or replay a stored payload deterministically. Those belong to the event layer rather than the execution layer.