Every free background jobs tier that clears our bar in 2026: 5 offers meet the criteria and 0 offers are demoted with a named reason. Recorded changes and a published ranking method. We could not confirm today's terms for 1 of them, and on all 1 our own read did not confirm them. Each row says why.
Serverless workflow orchestration — 50K executions, 500K events ingested, 5 concurrent steps, 500 MB span data ingested, 100K queue depth, 50 realtime connections
Workflow automation — self-hosted free (Sustainable Use License). 400+ integrations, visual workflow builder. Cloud free plan removed; all Cloud plans require payment (14-day free trial available). Unlimited active workflows on all paid plans
Background jobs platform — $5 free monthly compute, 20 concurrent runs, unlimited tasks, 5 team members, 10 schedules, 1 day log retention, community support
Free cron job scheduling — unlimited jobs (fair use), 60-second minimum interval, 30-second execution timeout. Auto-disables after 25+ consecutive failures
Free OSS (MIT). High-performance job queue for Node.js built on Redis. Delayed jobs, retries, priorities, concurrency, rate limiting, repeatable jobs
Nothing on this page is demoted today — we hold no disqualifying record against any of these offers.
| Vendor | Free Tier | Key Limits | Durability | Read / catalogue date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inngest | Hobby | Serverless workflow orchestration — 50K executions, 500K events ingested, 5 concurrent steps, 500 MB span data ingested,... | improving effective between 2026-06-06 and 2026-07-05 |
2026-11-08 |
| n8n | Self-Hosted | Workflow automation — self-hosted free (Sustainable Use License). 400+ integrations, visual workflow builder. Cloud free... read found the page different · 2026-10-25 |
stable | 2026-10-25 / 2026-08-17 |
| Trigger.dev | Free | Background jobs platform — $5 free monthly compute, 20 concurrent runs, unlimited tasks, 5 team members, 10 schedules, 1... | stable | 2026-10-31 |
| Cron-job.org | Free | Free cron job scheduling — unlimited jobs (fair use), 60-second minimum interval, 30-second execution timeout. Auto-disa... | stable | 2026-11-02 |
| BullMQ | Free OSS | Free OSS (MIT). High-performance job queue for Node.js built on Redis. Delayed jobs, retries, priorities, concurrency, r... | stable | 2026-11-10 |
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 5 free background jobs offers that clear our bar, each listed with the terms we publish and the date we last read them. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
5 offers meet our criteria for this category. Of those, 4 carry no recorded change to the terms we publish, and 1 a recorded widening. The Durability column below says which offer is in which group, and links the dated record behind every change. We do not rank these by how much you get, because the limits are not comparable without reading each vendor's page.