head to head · open source
Temporal vs Inngest
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars, 1,914 forks, 956 open issues and last shipped today. Inngest has 5,853 stars, 358 forks, 234 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Temporal leads on adoption by 296% (23,180 vs 5,853 stars). Temporal is written in Go under MIT; Inngest is written in Go under a custom or non-standard licence. Temporal has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, Inngest 6%. Temporal was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Temporal | Inngest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | MIT | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 358 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Temporal if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Inngest if
- You want the Inngest feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Inngest fits your workflow better
About Temporal
Temporal is a durable execution platform for building resilient applications with workflows. It lives in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, specifically within orchestration and scheduling. The server executes units of application logic called Workflows and automatically handles intermittent failures by retrying failed operations. Temporal originated as a fork of Uber's Cadence and is developed by Temporal Technologies, a startup formed by the creators of Cadence.
read the full Temporal overview →
About Inngest
Inngest is an open source workflow orchestration platform that lets developers write durable, event driven step functions in their existing language SDKs and run them on serverless, long running servers, or the edge.
read the full Inngest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Temporal or Inngest more popular?
Temporal has 23,180 GitHub stars and Inngest has 5,853. Temporal has the larger community by that measure.
Are Temporal and Inngest free?
Both are open source. Temporal is licensed under MIT, and Inngest has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Temporal and Inngest?
Temporal is written in Go and Inngest in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Temporal or Inngest?
Choose Temporal if you want the larger community (23,180 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Inngest if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.