When should I pick Temporal over Trigger.dev?

Pick Temporal if: A process runs for days or months and must pick up where it left off after a crash.

When should I pick Trigger.dev over Temporal?

Pick Trigger.dev if: You deploy to serverless hosting and have tasks that run for minutes.

Which is cheaper, Temporal or Trigger.dev?

At job runs or steps 100k runs, job compute time 20 hours: Temporal $5.50/mo (Developer (pay as you go)), Trigger.dev $0/mo (Free), at list prices.

Which do more makers use for background jobs & cron?

Among makers' products we track: Temporal 29, Trigger.dev 23.

How do Temporal and Trigger.dev compare in cost as you grow?

At 10 thousand runs Trigger.dev costs less ($0 vs $0.55); and still does at 10k thousand runs ($493 vs $550). Cheapest usable plan at each scale, at list prices.

Temporal vs Trigger.dev

Two sides of the background jobs & cron decision: durable workflow engine and hosted job platform. When each fits, what it costs, who moves from one to the other, and what makers who chose it say.

TemporalDurable workflow enginellms.txt

Trigger.devHosted job platformllms.txt

Ask your AI about this, with this page as the source:ChatGPT ↗Claude ↗Perplexity ↗

Which fits you

Choose Temporal if

A process runs for days or months and must pick up where it left off after a crash

Use it whenA process spans minutes to months and a failed step must resume where it left off, not restart.

Trade-offYou run worker processes, plus the Temporal server or Temporal Cloud billed per action; workflow code must be deterministic.

Choose Trigger.dev if

You deploy to serverless hosting and have tasks that run for minutes

Use it whenA task like video processing or a long AI call keeps hitting your serverless function's timeout.

Trade-offYour job code is deployed to and runs on Trigger.dev's infrastructure unless you self-host it.

At a glance

	Temporal	Trigger.dev
Used by	29 makers' products · 15 open-source projects	23 makers' products · 5 open-source projects
Cost at default usagejob runs or steps 100k runs, job compute time 20 hours	$5.50/mo Developer (pay as you go)	$0/mo Free
Downloads	3.7M/wk+64% vs npm	935.5k/wk3.5× vs npm
Pricing	Server free to self-host (MIT); Temporal Cloud is pay-as-you-go from $50 per million actions plus storage, with $150 in free credits for 90 days. · paid from $50 per 1M actions	Free tier; usage-based paid cloud plans; unlimited runs when self-hosted under its open-source license. · paid from $10/mo
Free tier	Yes	Yes
Open source	Yes · self-hostable	Yes · self-hostable
Incidents, 90 daysfrom its status page	34 (3 major)	no public status feed

Cost as you grow

At 10 thousand runs Trigger.dev costs less ($0 vs $0.55); and still does at 10k thousand runs ($493 vs $550). They're different kinds of tool — durable workflow engine and hosted job platform — so the prices don't buy the same thing.

Trigger.dev Temporalx: job runs or steps per month (thousand runs), other usage scaled with it · cheapest usable plan at each point, list prices · try your own numbers

The numbers, plan by plan

Job runs or steps per month	Temporal	Trigger.dev
10	$0.55 Developer (pay as you go)	$0 Free
50	$2.75 Developer (pay as you go)	$0 Free
100	$5.50 Developer (pay as you go)	$0 Free
500	$28 Developer (pay as you go)	$25 Hobby
1,000	$55 Developer (pay as you go)	$49 Hobby
5,000	$275 Developer (pay as you go)	$247 Hobby
10,000	$550 Developer (pay as you go)	$493 Hobby

From each vendor's pricing page: Temporal, Trigger.dev.

What makers say

Makers on using it for background jobs & cron, from Product Hunt and Starter Story interviews, each linked to the source. Products with a page of their own and fuller notes first.

On Temporal

It powers our multi-step workflows across agent actions. Temporal gives us durability, visibility, and precise control. Battle-tested orchestration with strong developer UX.

RunLLM, the makerSep 2026 ↗

Temporal is like React for asynchronous and scheduled tasks. It lets us build complex workflows with confidence and resilience, making sure they work perfectly every time.

Central, the makerSep 2026 ↗

Temporal gave us incredibly good reliability and cold/warm start times - we're able to start threads in well under a second thanks to it and Modal.

Hoplite, the makerSep 2026 ↗

13 more on the Temporal page →

On Trigger.dev

CopyCopter uses Trigger.dev as a background job manager, making the code cleaner, more scalable and more fun to play with! Trigger.dev is a must-have for NextJS Serverless App.s

CopyCopter, the makerSep 2026 ↗

Probably one of the best background task experiences I've ever had, it's so nice working with tools like this. Everything just works and it's super complete

Reloop, the makerSep 2026 ↗

Trigger.dev made it easy for us to do post-processing on Clawcast's conversations to generate audio in parrellel and ensure we create podcast cover art.

Clawcast, the makerSep 2026 ↗

9 more on the Trigger.dev page →

Loved and watch-outs

Themes that recur in makers' words and Hacker News comments, each linked to what it summarises.

Temporal

Most loved

Durable workflows survive retries, timeouts, crashes and deploys, replacing fragile stacks of queues, timers and cron jobs. PH PH 2 PH 3 HN
Retries and compensating actions are handled by the platform, so application code describes business logic rather than failure handling. HN HN 2 HN 3 PH
It is mature and battle-tested, reliably finishing workflows that sleep for months. HN HN 2 HN 3 PH

Watch-outs

It adds a real step up in app complexity and cognitive overhead, and some teams migrated off happier. HN HN 2 HN 3
Running it highly available in-house takes dedicated on-call engineers, which pushes teams to the paid cloud. HN
Heavy venture funding makes some users wary of vendor lock-in. HN HN 2

On Product Hunt: 5.0★, 28 reviews · mentioned most: fault tolerant, workflow orchestration, complex workflow management

Trigger.dev

Most loved

Tasks run without timeouts and retry automatically, which suits long-running, multi-step AI workflows and agents. PH PH 2 PH 3 HN
It takes queues and job infrastructure off the team's plate while staying in a TypeScript stack. PH HN HN 2
Clear documentation and founders who answer on Discord within hours. PH HN

On Product Hunt: 5.0★, 19 reviews · mentioned most: background job management, developer-friendly, scalability

Who uses each

Temporal29 makers' products

Trigger.dev23 makers' products

Used by both — often one replacing the other, or each for a different part of the product

Human Behavior

What makers pair each with

With Temporal

Web Analytics

With Trigger.dev

Database

Hosting

Neither quite right?

See the whole background jobs & cron decision →

InngestHosted job platformEvent-driven, multi-step workflows where each step retries on its own and your code stays in your existing app.vs Temporal →vs Trigger.dev →

UpstashServerless queueSimple scheduled calls and delayed HTTP jobs on serverless or edge hosting, via QStash.

BullMQSelf-run queueNode apps on a long-running server that already have Redis — free and fully in your control.