Hatchetvs
Temporal
Temporal: If you need proven durable execution at high scale with a large ecosystem and can carry the operational weight
Hatchet
Postgres-backed distributed task queue and workflow engine for Python, TypeScript and Go
As of 31 August 2026, Hatchet has a free plan and paid plans start at $500/month. A durable task orchestration platform built on Postgres rather than Redis or a bespoke store, so its queue state lives in a database you already know how to back up and inspect. Softwr lists it under Automation Integration. Hatchet is available on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud.
Overview
What Hatchet does
Hatchet is a distributed task queue and workflow engine. You write functions in Python, TypeScript or Go, register them as tasks with a Hatchet worker, and the engine handles scheduling, concurrency control, fairness between tenants, rate limiting, retries, timeouts, cron scheduling and directed acyclic graph dependencies between steps. Durable execution lets a workflow sleep or wait for an external event and resume later without holding a process open. The architectural decision that distinguishes it is using Postgres as the queue backend. Most durable execution systems bring their own storage layer or depend on a separate cluster, and that becomes a second operational system to run, monitor and restore. Hatchet's state is in Postgres tables, so backups, point-in-time recovery, replication and SQL inspection all work the way your team already operates them, and self-hosting is genuinely realistic rather than nominally supported. The code is MIT licensed. Pricing runs free for the first 100,000 task runs then 10 US dollars per million, with a Team tier at 500 US dollars a month adding ten users, five tenants, three-day retention and 500 requests per second, and Scale at 1,000 dollars. Buyers are engineering teams building AI agent pipelines, background job systems and data workflows who found Celery inadequate and Temporal too heavy. The trade-off is maturity: Hatchet is young, its throughput ceiling is bounded by Postgres, and retention on the managed tiers is short.
What people use it for
- An AI product running long agent pipelines that must survive worker restarts and resume mid-workflow
- A team that outgrew Celery and wants concurrency keys, fairness and rate limiting without building them
- An engineering group that wants durable execution self-hosted with no datastore beyond the Postgres they already run
- A multi-tenant SaaS that needs one noisy customer's jobs not to starve everyone else's
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Hatchet.
- Postgres as the queue backend simplifies operations but sets a throughput ceiling, and very high task rates require database tuning or partitioning work that a purpose-built queue would not demand.
- Data retention on the managed tiers is three days on Team and seven on Scale, which is short for debugging intermittent failures and forces you to export run history elsewhere.
- The step from the free tier to Team is 500 US dollars a month plus usage, which is a large increment for a small team that simply needs a production SLA.
- Hatchet is a young company in a category with Temporal, Inngest and cloud-native alternatives already established, so ecosystem, hiring pool and third-party material are all thin.
- Self-hosting the MIT engine is realistic but you then run the engine, its Postgres and its workers yourself, and the managed features such as audit logs and support are not part of that.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Hatchet
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- HatchetvsInngest
Inngest: If you want event-driven durable functions with a simpler serverless-first developer experience
- HatchetvsDagster
Dagster: If the work is data pipelines with assets and lineage rather than general background tasks
Pricing
What Hatchet costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Developer
Free
- First 100,000 task runs included
- $10 per million task runs after
- No card required
- Community support
Team
$500 /mo
- Usage billed on top of the base fee
- 10 users and 5 tenants
- 3 day data retention
- 500 requests per second
Scale
$1,000 /mo
- Unlimited users and tenants
- 7 day data retention
- Audit logs
- HIPAA compliance support
Enterprise
On request
- 300 million plus runs a month
- Latency guarantees and custom SLAs
- SSO and audit logging
- Bring your own cloud and self-host support
Capabilities
Features
Postgres-backed queue
Durable task state stored in Postgres with no separate datastore to operate
Durable execution
Workflows that sleep, wait for events and resume without holding a process
DAG workflows
Multi-step workflows with dependencies, fan-out and conditional branches
Concurrency and fairness
Per-key concurrency limits and round-robin fairness across tenants
Rate limiting
Global and per-key rate limits for calls into constrained downstream APIs
Cron and scheduling
Recurring and one-off scheduled task triggers
Multi-language SDKs
Python, TypeScript and Go workers against one engine
Self-hosting
MIT licensed engine deployable on your own infrastructure
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is Hatchet open source?
Yes, the engine is MIT licensed and can be self-hosted, with a managed cloud offered alongside.
What does it cost?
Free for the first 100,000 task runs, then 10 US dollars per million. Team is 500 US dollars a month plus usage; Scale is 1,000.
Why Postgres as the queue?
So durable task state lives in a database your team already backs up, replicates and can inspect with SQL, instead of a second system.
How does it compare with Temporal?
Lighter to adopt and operate, with a much smaller ecosystem and a lower throughput ceiling from the Postgres backend.
Keep looking
Where to go from Hatchet
- Hatchet alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Hatchet pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Hatchet badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Automation Integration softwareThe full category
- Best Automation Integration softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Automation Integration software for
Compare Hatchet with
- Temporal
- Inngest
- Dagster
- Orkes
- Flowable
- jBPM
- Prefect
- Camunda
- Autonoly
- Decodable
- CrewAI
- Cyclr
- Paragon
- Workato
- Automation Anywhere
- Blue Prism
- Prefect
- CrewAI
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Hatchet, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Hatchet
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Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
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