Inngest vs River
Inngest
inngest.comRiver
riverqueue.comSide by side
| Figure | Inngest | River |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $99/mo | $125/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 3 |
| Spec score · Task Queue Software | 9.1 (#3) | 7.8 (#17) |
| Company | Inngest describes itself as open core and says it released its event driven workflow product in 2022. | The site identifies the company as River Software, LLC and names Blake Gentry and Brandur Leach on its About page. |
| Integrations | The documentation describes integrations for Vercel and Netlify deployment syncs, Neon database events, and Datadog and Prometheus monitoring. | River's OpenTelemetry plugin supports telemetry through compatible providers such as DataDog and Sentry rather than vendor-specific River packages. |
| Security | Inngest states it is SOC 2 Type II compliant and offers a signed DPA to customers on paid plans. | River Pro includes an encrypted jobs feature, and Enterprise subscribers can access River's SOC 2 report. |
| Self-hosting | The CLI is a single binary containing Inngest services and can run locally or in other environments via Docker, npm or downloaded binaries. | River UI is an optional self-hosted interface, and the product says it adds no external service dependencies. |
Plans
In their own words
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.
River
River is a background job queue for Go applications, using PostgreSQL or SQLite to store jobs. Its transactional enqueueing keeps a job from running until the database transaction that inserted it has completed. The core set includes isolated queues, unique jobs, prioritization, recurring cron jobs, snoozing, transactional completion, and test helpers. A web interface, pause and resume controls, automatic retries, error reporting, and telemetry integrations support operations. River UI is optional and self-hosted, with no external service dependencies. PostgreSQL is the primary database target; SQLite support is experimental. River Pro adds workflows that split complex work into individually retryable tasks, plus batching, concurrency limits, and ordered job sequences. The free Open Source plan includes the web UI but excludes workflows, concurrency limits, and support. Pro costs $125 a month and includes email support for up to 20 developers. Enterprise pricing is custom and includes email and Slack support, unlimited developers, and access to a SOC 2 report.