Compare 5 free background jobs tools, free tiers, and developer deals. 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. Nothing on record contradicts our terms for Inngest, Trigger.dev, Cron-job.org, BullMQ.
What this name holds: Job queues, schedulers and durable execution called from your own code.
One other name here answers “how do I run work in the background”, and each holds a different list: Workflow Automation (7).
We track 5 background jobs services with a free tier we hold as current. This category has been mostly stable — only 1 pricing change recorded across all vendors.
| Vendor | Tier | Description | Read / catalogue date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inngest | Hobby | Serverless workflow orchestration — 50K executions, 500K events ingested, 5 concurrent steps, 500 MB span data ingested, 100K queue depth, 50 realtime connections | 2026-11-08 |
| Trigger.dev | Free | Background jobs platform — $5 free monthly compute, 20 concurrent runs, unlimited tasks, 5 team members, 10 schedules, 1 day log retention, community support | 2026-10-31 |
| Cron-job.org | Free | Free cron job scheduling — unlimited jobs (fair use), 60-second minimum interval, 30-second execution timeout. Auto-disables after 25+ consecutive failures | 2026-11-02 |
| n8n | Self-Hosted | 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 plansOur read on 2026-10-25 found the page different from the terms we hold, and we hold no confirmation of the terms we publish. | 2026-10-25 / 2026-08-17 |
| BullMQ | Free OSS | Free OSS (MIT). High-performance job queue for Node.js built on Redis. Delayed jobs, retries, priorities, concurrency, rate limiting, repeatable jobs | 2026-11-10 |