Gearman vs Inngest
Gearman
gearman.org
Inngest
inngest.comSide by side
| Figure | Gearman | Inngest |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $99/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 4 |
| Spec score · Task Queue Software | 8.8 (#4) | 9.1 (#3) |
| Documentation depth | The documentation site includes getting started material, a manual, protocol specifications, generated gearmand documentation, libgearman references, install guides, SSL instructions, and changelogs. | Documentation includes concepts, quick starts, limits, SDK references, deployment, operations, examples, MCP and LLM-friendly documentation. |
| Founded | 2005 | 2022 |
| Licence | The project describes itself as open source and BSD licensed; the C server and libgearman are specifically identified as BSD licensed. | The server and CLI use the Server Side Public License with delayed Apache 2.0 publication, while SDKs use Apache 2.0. |
| Security | The download page says the pure Perl Gearman client and worker API supports SSL. | Inngest states it is SOC 2 Type II compliant and offers a signed DPA to customers on paid plans. |
| What it does | Gearman distributes work to other machines or processes for parallel execution, load balancing, and cross-language function calls. | Inngest runs durable, observable workflows and agents in existing application code, retrying failed steps and preserving their results. |
Plans
In their own words
Gearman
Gearman is a free, self-hosted application framework for distributing work across machines or processes. A client submits jobs, a job server routes them, and a worker performs them, allowing parallel processing and load balancing. Jobs can run asynchronously in the background or receive priorities. Clients and workers may use different language interfaces when they understand the workload; listed interfaces include C, C#/.NET, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Lisp. Messages can reach 4 GB, with chunking for larger messages. Clients and workers can connect to multiple job servers and fail over when one dies. The C job server supports persistent queues. MySQL and PostgreSQL functions expose client calls to queries, triggers, and stored procedures, while the pure Perl API supports SSL. Gearman runs on Linux and Windows, offers API access, and is licensed under BSD. GearmanSharp is incomplete.
Inngest
Inngest runs asynchronous code as durable functions for event-driven workflows, background jobs, and agents. Its execution steps handle retries, retain state, and recover from failures; traces show activity from trigger to completion. Flow controls manage concurrency and fairness when users compete for resources. Developers can use open-source SDKs for TypeScript, Python, and Go, or the REST API. Functions can run wherever an app is hosted, with deployment guides for services including Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Render, and DigitalOcean. Inngest also describes isolated sandboxes for testing changes and tools for scoring and comparing variants on production traffic. The Free plan includes 5 seats, 50k executions, 500k events ingested, and 24-hour trace history. Execution pauses when the free quota is reached until the account upgrades. Pro starts at $99/mo. Inngest states that it is SOC 2 Type II compliant, and that its US-based databases are encrypted at rest and application traffic uses TLS/SSL in transit.