AWS Step Functions vs Hatchet

AWS Step Functions is a cloud workflow service for coordinating AWS services and HTTPS endpoints, including SaaS applications. Workflows are state machines written in Amazon States Language, with Workflow Studio providing a visual designer. Definitions can branch, run steps in parallel, set timeouts, retry failures, and handle errors with try/catch or rollback patterns. Service integrations connect to over 200 AWS services, while AWS SDK integrations can invoke over 9,000 API actions. HTTPS endpoint integration connects directly to HTTP-based services. Distributed Map can process large datasets, including Amazon S3 data, with up to 10,000 parallel child executions in one Map Run. Execution history, CloudWatch Logs, and AWS X-Ray support review and tracing. Standard executions can run for up to one year; Express executions can run for up to five minutes. Task, state, or execution input and output is limited to 256 KiB. A Free Tier plan is listed at free indefinitely; Standard and Express plans bill usage.

Hatchet is a developer platform for building and deploying AI agents, durable workflows, and background tasks. It persists tasks and agent invocations so teams can debug, retry, and replay execution. Workflow controls include automatic retries, scheduled and cron runs, event and webhook triggers, concurrency settings, priorities, and rate limits. SDKs are documented for Python, TypeScript, Go, and Ruby. Hatchet provides real-time workflow and task monitoring, a built-in OpenTelemetry collector, and searchable application logs. Its orchestration engine runs through Hatchet Cloud or can be self-hosted, while workers run on customer infrastructure. Embedded mode supports local development and CI without an account or Docker; CLI, Docker Compose, and Kubernetes options are also available. The Pay-as-you-go plan starts at free, including 1M runs and 1M events per month; usage beyond those amounts is billed at $30 per million runs and $5 per million events. SOC 2 Type II is included on every listed tier. Hatchet says that tasks are dropped and new task creation returns errors when a free-tier limit is exceeded.