Inngest vs AWS Lambda
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Inngest and AWS Lambda.
Quick Verdict
3.9/5
Inngest
0 reviews
4.1/5
AWS Lambda
0 reviews
AWS Lambda is rated higher (4.1 vs 3.9). Inngest is a developer platform for building reliable event-driven background functions. Automatic retries, delays, fan-out, and step functions. Works with Next.js, Node.js, Go, and Python. AWS Lambda is the original FaaS service — run code without servers. Supports 15+ runtimes, 1M free requests/month, and integrates deeply with 200+ AWS services. Triggered by S3, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and more.
Inngest Event-driven functions with automatic retries |  AWS Lambda The original serverless functions service | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.9 (0 reviews) | 4.1 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium (pay per request + GB-second; MicroVMs/Managed Instances metered differently) |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Full-stack and product developers adding reliable background jobs, webhooks, scheduled tasks, or multi-step AI agent workflows to existing apps without building queue infrastructure | AWS developers building event-driven, variable-traffic workloads — webhooks, media processing, scheduled jobs, API backends — who want to stop managing servers entirely |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | — | All 39 AWS regions / 124 AZs |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tieropen sourceapi access | free tierapi accessus datacentereu datacenterapac datacenter |
| Visit Inngest → | Visit AWS Lambda → | |
Inngest
Pros
- + Real free tier ($0, no card, 50k executions) that pauses at quota instead of billing overage
- + Durable execution without operating queues, brokers, or worker fleets — code stays on your infra
- + Open-source, self-hostable server as an exit path from vendor lock-in
- + Strong SDK coverage (TypeScript, Python, Go, Kotlin) and developer tooling (dev server, replay, traces)
- + Per-run economics are excellent at volume on Pro ($99/mo for 1M executions)
Cons
- - Execution billing counts every step (runs x steps+1), so step-heavy workflows burn quota fast
- - Steep free-to-Pro jump to $99/mo once free caps (5 concurrent steps, 24h traces) bite
- - No published uptime SLA below enterprise agreements
- - Not infrastructure — you still need somewhere to run your code
- - Plan walls on workspaces, apps, and trace retention push growing teams upward quickly
AWS Lambda
Pros
- + Zero idle cost with a free tier that covers small products: 1M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds monthly
- + Graviton pricing at $0.0000133334 per GB-second undercuts x86 by roughly 20%
- + Automatic multi-AZ scaling with a 99.95% per-region SLA and no capacity planning
- + Deep event integration across AWS services, with three form factors (Event/Web Functions, MicroVMs)
Cons
- - Per-request and GB-second pricing gets expensive against committed compute at steady high utilization
- - Cold starts — hundreds of milliseconds to seconds depending on runtime — with provisioned concurrency as an extra meter
- - 15-minute execution limit and payload caps make it wrong for long-running batch work
- - AWS-specific event plumbing creates real lock-in; distributed event chains are hard to debug
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