Trigger.dev
Trigger.dev is a managed and open-source platform for running long-running, durable background jobs and orchestrating serverless tasks without typical serverless timeouts. It provides programmable orchestration, durability via checkpoints, and real-time status streaming so teams can build reliable workflows directly in application code.
It’s aimed at web and SaaS teams that need dependable background processing, including media pipelines, AI/ML workloads, and multi-step data jobs. Developers get SDKs, a CLI, and integrations for common tools, plus a hosted service that auto-scales and a self-hosted option for teams with stricter requirements.
Use Cases
- Product/SaaS engineering: user-facing jobs with progress UIs (e.g., file imports, video processing, document generation) using realtime status streaming.
- AI/ML workflows: long-running model inference, multi-step pipelines, and agentic tasks that exceed standard serverless timeouts.
- Data engineering: multi-step ETL jobs with checkpointing to resume after failures without reprocessing entire runs.
- Event-driven automations: webhook ingestion and fan-out, reacting to third-party events, and coordinating downstream tasks.
- Cron and scheduled operations: nightly syncs, report generation, backups, and other periodic tasks.
- Operations and notifications: transactional email/SMS/Slack, alerting, and integrations with services like Prisma, Resend, Sentry, and Supabase.
- Preview and environment workflows: safe testing across DEV/STAGING/PROD and preview branches during PRs.
Strengths
- Long-running, durable tasks: jobs can run for minutes to hours (or more) without serverless timeouts, enabling heavy workloads like media processing and complex AI runs.
- Automatic retries and error handling: built-in policies and nested retries reduce toil and improve reliability for transient failures.
- Checkpointing and durability: resume from saved state after crashes or restarts to avoid rework and reduce cost.
- Realtime run-status streaming: APIs and React hooks surface live progress, logs, and outputs to frontends and dashboards.
- Programmable orchestration: write orchestration logic in normal async code (task chaining, scheduling, waiting for events) instead of a custom DSL.
- Customizable build/runtime: add system packages and binaries (e.g., Puppeteer, FFmpeg, Prisma) for heavy or specialized workloads.
- Integrations and SDKs: prebuilt connectors for popular services and tools speed up integration.
- Managed, auto-scaling infrastructure: hosted option reduces ops; self-hosting is available for teams that need it.
- Open source (Apache-2.0): transparency for audits, the ability to customize, and community contributions.
- Developer experience: local CLI, hot reload, and quickstarts shorten iteration loops.
- Scheduling and event triggers: supports cron-style jobs, webhooks, and event-driven orchestration.
Limitations
- Self-hosting complexity: durability features may depend on specific platform capabilities, increasing ops effort compared with the hosted service.
- Cost for heavy workloads: long-running, CPU/GPU-intensive jobs can become expensive on hosted plans; estimate and consider self-hosting or hybrid approaches.
- Younger ecosystem: fewer community plugins and examples than long-established job systems; rely more on official docs and core integrations.
- Language/SDK focus: strongest developer experience is in JavaScript/TypeScript; other stacks may need HTTP/webhooks or custom wrappers.
Final Thoughts
Trigger.dev is a practical choice when you need durable, observable background jobs that exceed typical serverless limits. Its code-first model, retries, checkpointing, realtime status, and integrations make it productive for modern app and data workflows.
Start with the hosted service to move quickly, instrument jobs with realtime status for better UX and debugging, and benchmark costs on representative workloads. If you have strict compliance or cost constraints, evaluate the self-hosted path early and confirm required platform features. Ensure your language/runtime is well supported, and use environment separation and preview branches to ship safely.