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Temporal vs Inngest

SEPT 2026 audit

A comparison of Temporal and Inngest built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 27 criteria comparedSources last checked

The short answer

Choose Temporal if…

Long-running, stateful workflows where losing execution history is the failure that matters — Temporal keeps event history as first-class storage rather than logs that expire.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Choose Inngest if…

Multi-step workflows that need durable execution and retries between steps, rather than a bare queue you write a consumer for.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Consider something else if…

  • Temporal: You want to budget by counting jobs: pay-as-you-go bills from $50 per million Actions, a unit that does not map onto messages or task runs, plus storage and 10% of usage for support; the $150 starting credit lasts 90 days.
  • Inngest: Every step is a billable execution, so a three-step workflow costs three times what the run count implies, and the free plan allows five concurrent steps.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: Temporal alternatives · Inngest alternatives

19 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.

Visit Temporal documentationVisit Inngest documentation

No affiliate links, sponsored placements or paid rankings appear on this site. Ordering follows the sourced data and the stated criteria.

01.

At a glance.

CriterionTemporalInngest
Pricing
Free tier
No
Yes
Kind of free offerFree creditFree tier
Credit card to start
Yes — Card required to sign up for Temporal Cloud; not charged in the first 90 days while credits remain.
No
Entry paid planNo plan fee or minimum: pay-as-you-go has no base monthly fee and bills usage from $50 per million Actions, plus storage and Developer support at 10% of usage. New accounts start with $150 in credits valid for 90 days. The Business support add-on starts at $500/month.$99/month for Pro, described as a starting price with usage above the included allowance billed on top.
Pricing modelPay-as-you-go per Action with no base monthly fee: from $50 per million Actions, falling with volume to $25 self-serve. Storage is billed separately per GB-hour ($0.042 active, $0.00105 retained), and Developer support costs 10% of usage. The Business support add-on is the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage.Per execution, where a step counts the same as a run, plus separate meters for events ingested, span data, scores and realtime connections. The pricing page ships a calculator because the execution count is not the run count.
Infrastructure
Regions20 regions for Temporal Cloud Namespaces: 14 AWS regions and 6 Google Cloud regions, each with a PrivateLink or Private Service Connect endpoint.All customer data hosted on AWS databases located in the United States; no other region offered on the security page.
Queues
Included per monthNo monthly Actions allocation on pay-as-you-go, which bills every Action used. Business includes 2.5 million Actions a month, and Enterprise and Mission Critical include 10 million. An Action is Temporal's own unit (a workflow operation) and is not comparable to a message, operation or execution elsewhere in this category.50,000 executions a month on the free Hobby plan and 1,000,000 on Pro, pay-as-you-go to 20M. An execution is one function run or one step, so a run with two steps counts as three.
Maximum message size
2 MB maximum payload per request (each Workflow/Activity argument or return value); 4 MB per Event History transaction, non-configurable.
4 MiB per step-returned payload; 32 MiB total function run state; 10 MiB hard cap per event batch.
Message retentionClosed workflow Event History is kept for a Retention Period set per Namespace, up to 90 days on Temporal Cloud; longer needs the Export feature. Business includes 2.5 GB Active and 100 GB Retained Storage. Recorded without a magnitude: this is workflow-history retention, not how long an undelivered message survives.Queue depth rather than a time window: 100,000 queued items on the free plan and 1,000,000 or more on Pro. Trace retention is 7 days on Pro and 90 on Enterprise.
Maximum delay
Timers (durable sleeps) may run up to 100 years in Temporal Cloud.
Step sleeps up to 1 year on paid plans; the free plan supports sleeps up to 7 days.
Concurrency500 Actions per second per Namespace by default, auto-scaling above that with On-Demand Capacity; 20,000 Activity and 20,000 Workflow Task pollers per Namespace.5 concurrent steps on the free plan, 100 or more on Pro, custom on Enterprise.
Compliance
SOC 2SOC 2 Type II certified; trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA badges.SOC 2 Type II compliant; report available on request via the trust center.
ISO 27001ISMS is informed by the NIST Cybersecurity Framework; the DPA's certification/assurance measure names only third-party SOC 2 Type II audits. Adjacent evidence: the DPA claims no ISO 27001 certificate, but no Temporal page explicitly denies one.Not held as of the June 2024 SOC 2 announcement, which says Inngest is exploring additional certifications, such as ISO 27001. Stated on the SOC 2 Type II announcement, dated Jun 20, 2024.
HIPAATemporal Cloud is stated to be compliant with HIPAA regulations; HIPAA listed among trust-center certifications.HIPAA BAAs offered as an add-on for healthcare compliance (Enterprise column of the pricing table).
GDPR / data residency
GDPR compliant with a DPA reflecting GDPR; Namespaces do not share data processing or storage across regional boundaries.
Data residency only: Inngest Cloud runs in two eastern-US footprints, AWS us-east-2 (Ohio) and Inngest bare metal in Ashburn, Virginia.
Encryption at restPersistence layer and Elasticsearch index encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM; TLS 1.3 in transit.All data in Inngest databases is encrypted at rest and in transit; optional encryption middleware lets you bring your own key.
Customer-managed keysClient-side Data Converter encrypts payloads with your keys on your Workers before they reach Temporal Cloud, which cannot decrypt them; no server-side KMS option stated.Bring-your-own-key via SDK encryption middleware that encrypts payloads client-side before they reach Inngest; not a server-side KMS option.
Role-based access controlPredefined account-level roles (Account Owner, Global Admin, Developer, Finance Admin, Read-Only) plus Namespace-level permissions (Admin, Write, Read-Only), with optional Custom Roles for granular access.SAML, RBAC and audit trails listed as Enterprise plan features.
Dedicated infrastructure
Temporal Cloud is a multi-tenant service; Namespaces are logically segregated and do not share data processing or data storage across regional boundaries. No single-tenant or dedicated-cell option is offered anywhere in the Cloud docs or the plan matrix.
Enterprise runs on dedicated function execution infrastructure with isolated queue and constraint shards; Dedicated Infrastructure is an enterprise add-on. The add-on's contents and price are not described on the page.

Only criteria both providers publish appear here; a tinted cell marks a real difference. Criteria only one of them documents are listed below, and an absence there means we found no source — not that the feature is missing. How we source this.

The small bar above a value is inetGeek's own lean toward that side — computed from the same facts shown, never a number the provider published. See the picker below "The short answer" to weigh only the criteria you care about.

02.

Where they differ.

Free tier

Temporal
No
Inngest
Yes
Sources (2) →

Kind of free offer

Temporal
Free credit
Inngest
Free tier
Sources (2) →

Credit card to start

Temporal
Yes — Card required to sign up for Temporal Cloud; not charged in the first 90 days while credits remain.
Inngest
No
Sources (2) →

Entry paid plan

Temporal
No plan fee or minimum: pay-as-you-go has no base monthly fee and bills usage from $50 per million Actions, plus storage and Developer support at 10% of usage. New accounts start with $150 in credits valid for 90 days. The Business support add-on starts at $500/month.
Inngest
$99/month for Pro, described as a starting price with usage above the included allowance billed on top.
Sources (2) →
  • Temporal Platform Pricing Options | Temporal ↗

    “No commitment. No minimums. [...] Pay-As-You-Go Starting at $50 per million actions Get started for free Free $150 credits for 90 days No base monthly fee $0.042/GBhr Active Storage $0.00105/GBhr Retained Storage Developer support for 10% of usage [...] Business Starting at $500/month”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Pricing — Inngest ↗

    “Pro [...] Starting at $99/mo [...] 1M executions included Pay as you go up to 20M”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Pricing model

Temporal
Pay-as-you-go per Action with no base monthly fee: from $50 per million Actions, falling with volume to $25 self-serve. Storage is billed separately per GB-hour ($0.042 active, $0.00105 retained), and Developer support costs 10% of usage. The Business support add-on is the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage.
Inngest
Per execution, where a step counts the same as a run, plus separate meters for events ingested, span data, scores and realtime connections. The pricing page ships a calculator because the execution count is not the run count.
Sources (2) →
  • Temporal Platform Pricing Options | Temporal ↗

    “Pay-As-You-Go Starting at $50 per million actions [...] No base monthly fee $0.042/GBhr Active Storage $0.00105/GBhr Retained Storage Developer support for 10% of usage 99.9% SLA and 99.99% HA Options SSO via SAML Volume Discounts Self service down to $25 per million actions [...] Price: Greater of $500/mo or 10% of usage”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Pricing — Inngest ↗

    “TOTAL EXECUTIONS PER MONTH (30,000 runs × 2 steps per run) + 30,000 runs = 90,000 executions [...] 500 MB span data ingested [...] 10K scores [...] 500k events ingested [...] 50 realtime connections”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Regions

Temporal
20 regions for Temporal Cloud Namespaces: 14 AWS regions and 6 Google Cloud regions, each with a PrivateLink or Private Service Connect endpoint.
Inngest
All customer data hosted on AWS databases located in the United States; no other region offered on the security page.
Sources (2) →

Included per month

Temporal
No monthly Actions allocation on pay-as-you-go, which bills every Action used. Business includes 2.5 million Actions a month, and Enterprise and Mission Critical include 10 million. An Action is Temporal's own unit (a workflow operation) and is not comparable to a message, operation or execution elsewhere in this category.
Inngest
50,000 executions a month on the free Hobby plan and 1,000,000 on Pro, pay-as-you-go to 20M. An execution is one function run or one step, so a run with two steps counts as three.
Sources (2) →
  • Temporal Cloud Pricing ↗

    “Some plans include a monthly Actions allocation (2.5M on Business, 10M on Enterprise/Mission Critical). [...] On the Temporal Cloud pay-as-you-go model, you are only billed for what you use (actions, storage, support).”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Pricing — Inngest ↗

    “50k executions [...] 1M executions included Pay as you go up to 20M [...] (30,000 runs × 2 steps per run) + 30,000 runs = 90,000 executions [...] A single durable function run or step execution”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Maximum message size

Temporal

2 MB maximum payload per request (each Workflow/Activity argument or return value); 4 MB per Event History transaction, non-configurable.

Inngest

4 MiB per step-returned payload; 32 MiB total function run state; 10 MiB hard cap per event batch.

Sources (2) →

Message retention

Temporal
Closed workflow Event History is kept for a Retention Period set per Namespace, up to 90 days on Temporal Cloud; longer needs the Export feature. Business includes 2.5 GB Active and 100 GB Retained Storage. Recorded without a magnitude: this is workflow-history retention, not how long an undelivered message survives.
Inngest
Queue depth rather than a time window: 100,000 queued items on the free plan and 1,000,000 or more on Pro. Trace retention is 7 days on Pro and 90 on Enterprise.
Sources (2) →
  • Temporal Cloud pricing | Temporal Documentation ↗

    “Temporal Cloud stores Event History for a defined Retention Period [...] When closed Workflow Histories need to be retained for more than the 90-day maximum period on Temporal Cloud, we recommend using our Export feature. [...] 2.5M Actions - 2.5 GB Active Storage - 100 GB Retained Storage”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Pricing — Inngest ↗

    “100k queue depth [...] 1M+ queue depth [...] Granular tracing, metrics, alerts + 7 day trace retention [...] Advanced tracing, metrics, alerts + 90 day trace retention”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Maximum delay

Temporal

Timers (durable sleeps) may run up to 100 years in Temporal Cloud.

Inngest

Step sleeps up to 1 year on paid plans; the free plan supports sleeps up to 7 days.

Sources (2) →

Concurrency

Temporal
500 Actions per second per Namespace by default, auto-scaling above that with On-Demand Capacity; 20,000 Activity and 20,000 Workflow Task pollers per Namespace.
Inngest
5 concurrent steps on the free plan, 100 or more on Pro, custom on Enterprise.
Sources (2) →

SOC 2

Temporal
SOC 2 Type II certified; trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA badges.
Inngest
SOC 2 Type II compliant; report available on request via the trust center.
Sources (2) →

ISO 27001

Temporal
ISMS is informed by the NIST Cybersecurity Framework; the DPA's certification/assurance measure names only third-party SOC 2 Type II audits. Adjacent evidence: the DPA claims no ISO 27001 certificate, but no Temporal page explicitly denies one.
Inngest
Not held as of the June 2024 SOC 2 announcement, which says Inngest is exploring additional certifications, such as ISO 27001. Stated on the SOC 2 Type II announcement, dated Jun 20, 2024.
Sources (2) →

HIPAA

Temporal
Temporal Cloud is stated to be compliant with HIPAA regulations; HIPAA listed among trust-center certifications.
Inngest
HIPAA BAAs offered as an add-on for healthcare compliance (Enterprise column of the pricing table).
Sources (2) →

GDPR / data residency

Temporal
GDPR compliant with a DPA reflecting GDPR; Namespaces do not share data processing or storage across regional boundaries.
Inngest
Data residency only: Inngest Cloud runs in two eastern-US footprints, AWS us-east-2 (Ohio) and Inngest bare metal in Ashburn, Virginia.
Sources (2) →

Encryption at rest

Temporal
Persistence layer and Elasticsearch index encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM; TLS 1.3 in transit.
Inngest
All data in Inngest databases is encrypted at rest and in transit; optional encryption middleware lets you bring your own key.
Sources (2) →

Customer-managed keys

Temporal
Client-side Data Converter encrypts payloads with your keys on your Workers before they reach Temporal Cloud, which cannot decrypt them; no server-side KMS option stated.
Inngest
Bring-your-own-key via SDK encryption middleware that encrypts payloads client-side before they reach Inngest; not a server-side KMS option.
Sources (2) →

Role-based access control

Temporal
Predefined account-level roles (Account Owner, Global Admin, Developer, Finance Admin, Read-Only) plus Namespace-level permissions (Admin, Write, Read-Only), with optional Custom Roles for granular access.
Inngest
SAML, RBAC and audit trails listed as Enterprise plan features.
Sources (2) →
  • Roles and permissions | Temporal Documentation ↗

    “Some account-level roles, such as Account Owner and Global Admin, automatically have Namespace Admin permissions on all Namespaces in the account. [...] For more granular access control, you can also use Custom Roles to define specific permissions for specific Temporal Cloud resources and assign them to any principal. [...] You can grant Namespace Admin, Write, or Read-Only permissions to principals with the account-level roles of Developer, Finance Admin, or Read-Only.”

    Read 2026-09-27 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Pricing | Inngest ↗

    “Advanced tracing, metrics, alerts + 90 day trace retention Dedicated Slack channel SAML, RBAC, audit trails”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

Dedicated infrastructure

Temporal
Temporal Cloud is a multi-tenant service; Namespaces are logically segregated and do not share data processing or data storage across regional boundaries. No single-tenant or dedicated-cell option is offered anywhere in the Cloud docs or the plan matrix.
Inngest
Enterprise runs on dedicated function execution infrastructure with isolated queue and constraint shards; Dedicated Infrastructure is an enterprise add-on. The add-on's contents and price are not described on the page.
Sources (2) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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03.

Documented by only one.

These criteria are published by one provider and not the other. An absence here means we have not found a source, not that the feature is missing — except where we say we read the other provider's own page on a given date and it does not state it. Those rows lean, and the provider can correct them with a link.

What the free plan includesInngest: 50,000 executions and 500,000 events ingested a month with 5 concurrent steps, no credit card required.
Startup credit programTemporal: Temporal Cloud startup credits: $6,000, for funded startups that have raised $30M or less.
Uptime SLATemporal: 99.9% on the pay-as-you-go Temporal Cloud plan (no base fee), with 99.99% High Availability options.
Dead letter queueInngest: Not supported — No dead-letter queue; failed runs stay in the dashboard and are re-run in bulk with Replay.
Support on entry paid planTemporal: Developer support comes with pay-as-you-go and is billed at 10% of usage. The Business support add-on, the greater of $500/month or 10% of usage, adds advanced technical support with a 2-hour P0 SLA in business hours.
Response time commitmentTemporal: P0 response: 1 business day on Developer (the pay-as-you-go support level), 2 business hours on Business, 30 minutes on Enterprise and 15 minutes on Mission Critical. No comparable number, because a business day is not a fixed span.
PCI DSSTemporal: Terms of Service bar customers from submitting payment card information to the Hosted Services; only contact name, title and email address are permitted. Clause 1.6 Personal Data; a contractual data restriction, not a statement about PCI DSS certification.
Private networking / VPCTemporal: AWS PrivateLink or GCP Private Service Connect to Namespaces, alongside the default public endpoints.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Temporal or Inngest?

Temporal: No plan fee or minimum: pay-as-you-go has no base monthly fee and bills usage from $50 per million Actions, plus storage and Developer support at 10% of usage. New accounts start with $150 in credits valid for 90 days. The Business support add-on starts at $500/month.

Inngest: $99/month for Pro, described as a starting price with usage above the included allowance billed on top.

Free tier: Temporal or Inngest?

Temporal: No

Inngest: Yes

Should I choose Temporal or Inngest?

Pick Temporal if Long-running, stateful workflows where losing execution history is the failure that matters — Temporal keeps event history as first-class storage rather than logs that expire.

Pick Inngest if Multi-step workflows that need durable execution and retries between steps, rather than a bare queue you write a consumer for.

Provider pages

TemporalDurable execution platform metered in Actions, with storage split between open and closed workflows, and a self-hosted open-source edition.InngestDurable execution platform where the billable unit is a function or step execution rather than a queued message.

Related comparisons

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Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.