# Or · Orchestration — element 13 of 58 > Who does what, when. Turns a pile of agents into a schedule. - **Group:** 3 · Agents & Automation - **Necessity:** Optional - **Price band:** $ · under $30/mo - **Maturity:** Experimental - **Edition:** v2026.Q3 · verified 2026-09-13 ## Leading tools (v2026.Q3) - **Temporal** — durable execution, the standard - **Inngest** — event-driven agent jobs - **Trigger.dev** — typescript agents, managed compute - **Hatchet** — postgres tasks, mit oss - **Restate** — single-binary durable runtime ## Our take The element most likely to matter more next year than this one. Watch it; don't over-buy it yet. ## Combines with Ag, Wf ## The top 5 — deep dossier (verified 2026-09-13) Temporal, once agents touch real money or real customers — it owns the durable-execution category it named, raised the segment's first mega-round ($300M Series D at $5B, Feb 2026), and runs OpenAI's production agent infrastructure. Inngest is the pick for TypeScript product teams who want event-driven jobs, per-tenant flow control, and agent tooling without running a cluster; Trigger.dev when your agents need hours of managed compute, not just managed state; Hatchet when you want an MIT-licensed engine on the Postgres you already have; Restate when latency and stateful agents matter enough to adopt the newest runtime. And honestly: pre-PMF, a cron job and a queue may still be the right amount of orchestration — this element rewards under-buying. 1. **Temporal** (Temporal Technologies) — Self-host free (MIT) · Cloud: Essentials from $100/mo (1M actions) · Business from $500/mo · Enterprise custom · $1,000 trial credits. Best for: Production agent fleets and money-touching workflows that must survive crashes, redeploys, and week-long human-in-the-loop pauses. Why: The category owner by every measure: $300M Series D at $5B (a16z, Feb 17, 2026) on 380% YoY revenue growth, 9.1T lifetime Temporal Cloud actions — 1.86T of them from AI-native companies — and OpenAI in production calling durable execution 'a core requirement for modern AI systems.' The OpenAI Agents SDK integration went GA Mar 23, 2026, making crash-proof agents a decorator away. Watch: The steepest learning curve in the category — deterministic-workflow constraints, workers, task queues — and self-hosting the server is a real ops job. Per-action Cloud pricing gets chatty-agent expensive; every tool call and retry is an action. [https://temporal.io](https://temporal.io) 2. **Inngest** (Inngest) — Hobby free (50k executions/mo) · Pro from $99/mo (1M executions, 100 concurrency) · Enterprise custom. Best for: TypeScript/serverless product teams who want durable step functions, events, and per-tenant flow control (debounce, throttle, concurrency) with zero infrastructure. Why: The developer-experience play: durable functions that run on your existing serverless or servers, triggered by events, with the best flow-control primitives in the category — the exact features multi-tenant AI products need. $21M Series A (Altimeter + a16z, Sep 16, 2025), SoundCloud and Day.ai in production, and 2026 shipped an agent stack — AgentKit for multi-agent networks plus Agent Evals, Sessions, and run scoring (Jun 2026). Watch: The server is SSPL with delayed Apache-2.0 — practically, you're buying the cloud. Execution-count pricing punishes chatty agents, and the eval push moves it onto Ev-element turf it hasn't proven yet. [https://www.inngest.com](https://www.inngest.com) 3. **Trigger.dev** (Trigger.dev (open source, Apache-2.0)) — Free ($5/mo credit, 100k runs-ish) · Hobby $10/mo · Pro $50/mo + per-second compute (from $0.0000169/s) · Enterprise custom. Best for: TypeScript agents that need long-running managed compute — no timeouts, checkpointed runs lasting hours — plus realtime streaming to your UI. Why: The only top pick that runs your code for you: tasks execute on Trigger.dev's elastic infrastructure with durable checkpointing, so agent runs survive crashes and last hours without you owning a worker fleet. 14.9k GitHub stars under Apache-2.0, v4 shipping steadily (v4.4.6, May 2026), and the whole product is now framed as 'build and deploy fully-managed AI agents.' Watch: TypeScript-only in practice, and the value is the managed compute — self-hosting the full platform is much heavier than the license suggests. Per-second machine pricing needs watching on long agent loops; smallest war chest of the top three. [https://trigger.dev](https://trigger.dev) 4. **Hatchet** (Hatchet (YC W24)) — MIT self-host free · Cloud: first 100k runs free then $10/1M · Team $500/mo + usage · Scale $1,000/mo · Enterprise custom. Best for: Teams already on Postgres who want a fully open-source (MIT) task queue, DAG, and durable-workflow engine without adopting a new database or a restrictive license. Why: The clean open-source option: an MIT-licensed 'orchestration engine for background tasks, AI agents, and durable workflows' built on plain Postgres, with Go, Python, and TypeScript SDKs — 7.3k GitHub stars and steady releases (Jun 2026). Cheapest serious cloud entry in the category at $10 per million runs, and the Postgres-native thesis just got endorsed by Microsoft's pg_durable. Watch: The cloud jumps from hobby-cheap to $500/mo Team with 500 RPS and 3-day retention — mid-size pricing is lumpy. Small team, no disclosed funding beyond YC-stage, and Postgres becomes your scaling ceiling. [https://hatchet.run](https://hatchet.run) 5. **Restate** (Restate (Stephan Ewen, Flink co-creator)) — Single-binary self-host (BSL 1.1 → Apache after 4 yrs) · Cloud free 50k actions/mo · usage plans from $75/mo · BYOC capacity pricing. Best for: Latency-sensitive, stateful agents and transactional workflows — virtual objects and durable promises in one Rust binary instead of a cluster. Why: The deepest engineering of the challengers: a log-based Rust runtime (v1.6.2, Feb 2026) that fuses durable execution, state, and messaging, from the team behind Apache Flink — already running 'the account and credit card stack of a tier 1 bank.' Restate Cloud opened to everyone Sep 30, 2025, and Pydantic AI ships an official Restate durable-agents integration. Watch: Smallest community of the five (~4k stars) and BSL 1.1 is not open source — the license blocks offering Restate as a service. The architecture is novel enough that hiring for it is hard; funding beyond seed unverified. [https://restate.dev](https://restate.dev) ### How to choose - If Agents touch money, customers, or anything you'd page someone over → Temporal — the learning curve is the price of the only orchestrator with OpenAI-scale production proof. Budget real onboarding time and watch per-action costs on chatty agents. - If You're a TS/serverless product team and your pain is events, retries, and per-tenant fairness (rate limits, debounce, concurrency) → Inngest — its flow-control primitives are the category's best, and the free 50k-execution tier covers most pre-launch products. - If Your agent runs are long-lived compute (scraping, video, deep research) and you don't want to own workers → Trigger.dev — the only top pick that sells you the machines too, with checkpointed no-timeout runs. - If You already run Postgres and refuse non-OSS licenses → Hatchet for a standalone MIT engine, or DBOS if you'd rather add a library to your app than a service to your stack — Microsoft's pg_durable (Jun 2026) says this whole approach is directionally right. - If You're pre-PMF and tempted by all of the above → Don't over-buy. A cron, a queue, and your deploy platform's built-in workflows (Vercel, Cloudflare) cover more than you think — adopt real orchestration when a failed retry first costs you money. ### The field (24 more) DBOS, Orkes Conductor, Conductor OSS (renamed), Cadence, AWS Step Functions, Azure Durable Functions / Durable Task Scheduler, pg_durable, Google Cloud Workflows, Cloudflare Workflows, Vercel Workflows, Upstash Workflow, Windmill, Kestra, Apache Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, Celery, BullMQ, River, Resonate, Hyrex, Defer (dead), Mergent (acquired), Quirrel (dead) Full dossier data: https://elems.ai/e/or.json --- Source: [elems.ai](https://elems.ai/e/or.html) — the periodic table of the AI-led startup. Data: https://elems.ai/elements.json (CC BY 4.0, cite elems.ai).