About Trigger.dev
Trigger.dev is an open-source platform for building AI workflows and agents in TypeScript. You write tasks that can run for a long time without timeouts, deploy them to the platform, and get durable execution, retries, queues, observability and elastic scaling without managing the infrastructure. It contrasts itself with serverless platforms that cut off long-running jobs.
Tasks can use the frameworks, services and models you already use. Beyond durability and idempotency, the platform lets you customize the runtime with system packages, so a task can run browsers, Python scripts or FFmpeg. Human-in-the-loop support lets a task pause until a person approves, rejects or gives feedback, and realtime and streaming features support live user interfaces. It integrates with Next.js, exposes an MCP server, and topics include orchestration and scheduling.
You can use Trigger.dev as a fully managed cloud or self-host it. The project is Apache-2.0 licensed and written in TypeScript, with documentation, example projects and a public roadmap. It suits developers who need reliable background jobs and agent workflows that outlast normal request timeouts.
Key features
- Long-running tasks without timeouts
- Durable execution with retries and queues
- Custom runtimes with browsers, Python and FFmpeg
- Human-in-the-loop approval steps
- Realtime and streaming updates
- Managed cloud or self-hosting
Good fit for
- →Durable AI agent workflows
- →Background jobs that exceed serverless limits
- →Scheduled and event-driven tasks
- Tags
- background-jobs
- workflow-automation
- ai-agents
- typescript
- orchestration
- scheduler
- mcp
- nextjs
- self-hosted
Trigger.dev: questions and answers
- What is Trigger.dev used for?
- Trigger.dev is an open-source platform for building durable AI agents and background workflows in TypeScript, with no timeouts, retries, queues and observability built in. It is a good fit for durable AI agent workflows, background jobs that exceed serverless limits, and scheduled and event-driven tasks.
- Is Trigger.dev open source?
- Yes. Trigger.dev is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at triggerdotdev/trigger.dev and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is Trigger.dev free?
- Yes. Trigger.dev is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from $10 per month.
- Can I self-host Trigger.dev?
- Yes. Trigger.dev can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What are some alternatives to Trigger.dev?
- Similar open-source tools in the Workflow Automation category include OpenOps, Activepieces and n8n. SaaS products in the same category include Latenode, Workato and Blueprint MCP.
- Is Trigger.dev actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Trigger.dev was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v4.7.1, published on 2 October 2026. The project has 16k stars on GitHub.
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