Show HN: Trigger.dev V2 – a Temporal alternative for TypeScript devs (opens in new tab)

Quite a lot of our customers are using us instead of Temporal. Not for linking stuff together use cases.

We'll be updating it as we make progress and open it up for early testers.

I'd also say that Windmill, and other similar tools like Airplane, are more focused on internal tools. Building internal admin tools and related workflows.

Our users are building some internal tools but also core parts of their product that involve user interaction.

If anything they have a cool slider/tabs for different actions.

We have a discussion about that here, would love to get your input: https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/discussions/516

Currently the major differences are:

- Open source: we're fully open source and self-hostable with Apache 2 license.

- API Integrations: we're building first class support for popular APIs. That makes it really easy to subscribe to webhooks, and when you do API calls you get good retrying behaviour, automatically dealing with rate limits, and a great logging experience. You can write your own integrations and contribute them (that would be awesome), or keep them private to your own codebase.

- React hooks: often background jobs are related to an action a person has done in your app (end-user or an admin tool). We have hooks so you can very easily show the live status of a run exactly how you want.

Very soon

- Support for Background Functions – we deploy your code so you can run any length of task. You write the code like any other job in your codebase. Discussion here: https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/discussions/400

- Support for long-running servers (so you can use if you’re not deploying to serverless). Issue here: https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/issues/244

We released our TS SDK a year ago so had quite a head start in this area. The approach in their V2 release makes them more similar to us, though there are still some large differences, including the fundamental architecture, queueing technology, scale, etc. Some differences you'll notice as a developer:

- Concurrency and parallelism. We allow you to run steps in parallel, configure concurrency (per function, or with sub-groups for custom concurrency limits), and automatically fan jobs in, eg https://www.inngest.com/docs/functions/concurrency and https://www.inngest.com/docs/guides/step-parallelism.

This is a pretty big point, as you often don't want to run functions sequentially. We're also fully event-driven, allowing you to pause workflows and automatically resume when specific events are received (https://www.inngest.com/docs/reference/functions/step-wait-f...).

We also handle a lot of complexity for you that you'd have to build yourself:

- Rate limiting

- Batching, allowing one function to run from eg. 100 events, instead of 1:1 matching of event->function

- Streaming, for long-running responses

- Auto-cancellation, based off of matching events

- Branch deploys for all workflows, regardless of platform

- Debounce

- And a bunch more such as middleware, error handlers, multi-language support (including zero-downtime live-migrations of long running workflows), fully-offline local development, etc.

In general, I think we're tackling a similar problem with fundamentally different approaches in events and architecture. Trigger definitely have more in the space of integrations, while our approach is: send us anything, no matter the event or source, and we'll work with it.

While I don't know the Trigger folks I'm assuming they've seen similar problems as us and it's fun to tackle this area, so I'm looking forward to seeing how they build out their platform in the future and this area evolves :)