Event-driven agent jobs with great DX

Scores as of 2026-09-14 (43 days old; Depot marks scores stale after 30 days). The pick is still Depot's current editorial pick; it has not been re-reviewed since. Prices below carry their own dates.

Depot Pick

Inngest · 8.07/10 for this job (curated estimate, high confidence)

DX + reliability balance; Inngest default for most product agents.

Runner-up

Trigger.dev · 7.84/10

Scores higher than the pick on: Price / performance, Developer & agent DX.

When not to use the pick

Polyglot extreme scale — Temporal; raw HTTP delayed callbacks without a workflow runtime — Upstash QStash; pure Python GPU jobs — Modal.

Lock-in / migration

The pick has lower stored lock-in risk than runner-up Trigger.dev (4.2 vs 4.8). Self-host fallback listed for this job: Hatchet.

Sourced price (no comparable unit)

Pick: no sourced price in this job's unit (no_matching_sourced_price).

No cheapest SKU (no_candidate_has_sourced_price_in_job_unit:queue_event). No price was invented.

Free option

• Hatchet (oss) — source, as of 2026-10-25
• Upstash QStash Free plan (free) — source, as of 2026-10-21

Failure modes to watch

• Partial tool success: Require a per-item status and a failure count. Success for the task requires the failed count to be zero or explicitly handed to a retry queue.
• Inter-agent misalignment: Log the assigned subtask next to the worker's stated result. The lead rejects a result that does not match the assignment.
• Observability gap: Alert on a drop in trace ingestion and on certificate expiry for the trace host. Do not treat a missing trace as a successful quiet run.
• Runaway spend: Set a budget and a tool-call cap per task. Alert when spend jumps. Stop the run at the cap instead of summarizing a partial trace as success.
• Tool loop: Hash the last several tool names and arguments. Stop when the same call repeats and the observation did not change. Cap tool calls per task.
• Hallucinated tool arguments: Reject a call that fails the current schema or names an unknown id, and do that before the tool runs a side effect.

Reported outcomes (submitted reports only)

This job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Depot Pick (Inngest) on this job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Cite: Agent Provider Depot, Depot Pick for event-driven-agent-jobs: inngest, scores as of 2026-09-14. Agents: GET /api/decide?jtbd=event-driven-agent-jobs