Inngest vs Workflow Engine
Inngest
inngest.comWorkflow Engine
workflowengine.ioSide by side
| Figure | Inngest | Workflow Engine |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $99/mo | $666.67/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 7 |
| Spec score · Workflow Orchestration Software | 9.0 (#4) | 7.8 (#25) |
| Company | Inngest describes itself as open core and says it released its event driven workflow product in 2022. | The product site identifies Optimajet Limited and lists its office at 14 Penn Plaza, 225 West 34th Street, New York, NY 10122. |
| Deployment | Inngest functions can run wherever an app is hosted, with platform guides for Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Render, and DigitalOcean. | Workflow Engine NEO adds an HTTP API and multitenancy, while Workflow Server is a standalone Docker service called over HTTP. |
| Integrations | The documentation describes integrations for Vercel and Netlify deployment syncs, Neon database events, and Datadog and Prometheus monitoring. | The maker lists plugins including Approval, Loops, File, Active Directory and Entra ID, Real-Time Tracking, and support for custom plugins. |
| Security | Inngest states it is SOC 2 Type II compliant and offers a signed DPA to customers on paid plans. | The core engine has no user store and delegates workflow command authorization to an application-provided rule provider; authentication remains the host application's responsibility. |
Plans
Workflow Engine
- Workflow Engine FreeFree
- Workflow Engine Team$2,000, paid once
- Workflow Engine Complete$5,000, paid once
- Workflow Engine NEO Subscription$8,000 a year
- Workflow Engine NEO Business$10,000, paid once
- Workflow Engine NEO SaaS$15,000, paid once
- Workflow Engine NEO EnterprisePriced on request
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.
Workflow Engine
Workflow Engine is an embeddable.NET library for managing business processes while saving their state in your database. It supports timers, audit history, and process versioning, and includes an HTML5 visual designer that can be embedded in an application. Designer packages are available for React, Angular, and vanilla JavaScript, with a documented Blazor integration. The core package supports.NET Framework 4.6.2 through.NET 10 and is deployed on-premises or in a customer's cloud. Supported databases include SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, MySQL, Oracle, and SQLite. It imports BPMN 2.0 diagrams as native schemes, but does not export diagrams back to BPMN. Workflow Engine Free is licensed for personal, non-commercial use and costs nothing; it is limited to 10 schemas and 4 execution threads. Paid options include one-time licenses and subscriptions. NEO adds an HTTP API and multitenancy, while Workflow Server is a standalone Docker service called over HTTP. The core engine has no user store; authentication is the host application's responsibility.