Hatchet

Hatchet is an open-source, Postgres-backed orchestration engine that combines a distributed task queue, a DAG runner, and a durable-execution engine into one platform with SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go, and Ruby. We rate it 83/100 — one of the most pragmatic durable workflow tools you can adopt in 2026, especially if you’re building AI agents, RAG pipelines, or any background job system that has outgrown Celery and BullMQ but doesn’t want the operational weight of Temporal.

What is Hatchet?

Hatchet was founded in late 2023 by Alexander Belanger (CEO, formerly co-founder/CTO at Porter, S20) and Gabe Ruttner, and went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch. The first public commit on the hatchet-dev/hatchet repo lands on December 15, 2023, and the company raised a $500K seed round from YC in April 2024. As of May 7, 2026, the repo has crossed 7,087 GitHub stars, 369 forks, and is MIT-licensed end-to-end.

The product solves a very specific problem better than its predecessors: keeping a task queue durable — persisting the full execution history, intermediate state, and event timeline of every run — without forcing you onto a separate Redis or RabbitMQ broker, and without the workflow-DSL friction of Temporal. Hatchet uses Postgres as the durability layer for both the runtime and the observability system, which is why teams who already operate Postgres can self-host the entire control plane in a single docker-compose.

Key Features of Hatchet

• Durable tasks & DAGs: Drop-in replacement for Temporal/DBOS workflows with no limit on the number of tasks spawned from a durable workflow, plus first-class DAG support for data-pipeline-style flows.
• Postgres-only architecture: No Redis, RabbitMQ, or Kafka required. Hatchet has been load-tested up to 10,000 tasks/second, with sub-second scheduling latency for typical workloads.
• Fine-grained concurrency & rate limits: Dynamic concurrency keys (e.g. one slot per user), per-task rate limits, priority lanes, fair scheduling, and worker affinity rules.
• AI-agent ergonomics: Streaming step outputs, durable sleep, durable event waits, and pause/resume conditions designed specifically for long-running LLM pipelines.
• Real-time UI + OpenTelemetry: A multi-tenant web dashboard with live run views, alerting, and built-in OpenTelemetry plus Prometheus metrics — no separate observability stack required.
• 2026 Hatchet CLI & MCP: Shipped February 26, 2026, the new CLI brings a TUI, hot-reload local workers, and a Model Context Protocol server so coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor can list, replay, and debug runs from the terminal.

What Users Say About Hatchet

The Show HN and Launch HN threads (item 39643136 and item 40810986) are the most useful primary sources of developer sentiment. The most upvoted comments praise three things: the Postgres-only architecture ("finally, a queue I can run in the same database as my app"), the speed of the Python SDK, and the fact that the OSS runner is genuinely usable without ever touching the cloud product. Recurring complaints in 2024–2025 were around early-stage UI bugs and Postgres tuning under load — both of which the team explicitly addressed in the v1 rewrite shipped in late 2024.

On Reddit’s r/Python and r/golang, Hatchet is usually recommended over Celery for new Python projects that need workflows, and over BullMQ for TypeScript teams that want durability. The 2026 PkgPulse comparison concludes that Inngest wins for fastest cloud onboarding, Trigger.dev v3 wins for self-hosted DX, and Hatchet wins for complex AI orchestration with fine-grained concurrency control — matching what most users on Discord report.

Hatchet Pricing

Hatchet’s open-source runner is MIT-licensed and free to self-host forever. Hatchet Cloud, the managed offering, follows usage-based pricing across four tiers as of May 2026:

Plan	Price	Key Limits
Developer	Free + $10 per 1M task runs	First 100,000 task runs included, SOC 2 Type II, no credit card required.
Team	$500/mo + usage	10 users & 5 tenants, 3-day retention, 500 RPS sustained throughput.
Scale	$1,000/mo + usage	Unlimited users & tenants, 7-day retention, audit logs, HIPAA.
Enterprise	Contact sales	300M+ runs/month, latency guarantees, SSO/SAML, bring-your-own-cloud, self-host support.

Yearly billing is 20% cheaper. The free Developer tier alone covers most prototypes and many small production apps — 100k runs/month is plenty for typical RAG, notification, or webhook fan-out workloads.

Who Should Use Hatchet?

Best for: Backend and AI engineering teams shipping Python, TypeScript, or Go services that need durable execution, retries, fan-out, and observability without standing up a Temporal cluster. Especially strong for RAG pipelines, agentic LLM workflows, scheduled GPU jobs, and per-user notification fan-out. Great for teams already running Postgres who want to avoid adding Redis or Kafka.

Not ideal for: Pure data-engineering shops who need rich source/sink connectors out of the box (Airflow, Prefect, and Dagster are still better). Extremely throughput-bound systems above 10k tasks/second on a single Postgres instance — at that scale, a Redis-backed BullMQ or Celery cluster will be cheaper to run, even if less durable.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Postgres as the only required dependency — an enormous operational simplification compared to Temporal’s Cassandra/Postgres + Elasticsearch + frontend/history/matching service stack.
• Truly free, MIT-licensed runner that the cloud product is built on top of — no bait-and-switch core/closed split.
• SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Go, and Ruby — covers most modern backend stacks without forcing a polyglot bridge.
• 2026 CLI/MCP integration makes Hatchet one of the first orchestration engines that’s native to AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor.

Cons:

• Postgres durability adds overhead vs. Redis-only queues; raw single-node throughput tops out around 10k tasks/second.
• Self-hosted UI and observability are catching up, but the Cloud version is still noticeably more polished.
• Smaller community than Temporal or Celery means fewer Stack Overflow answers and third-party plugins.

Alternatives to Hatchet

The natural shortlist is Temporal (more mature, heavier ops, better for very long-lived workflows), Inngest (HTTP-based, fastest cloud setup, less control), and Trigger.dev v3 (best self-host DX in TypeScript, but TS-only). For pure data pipelines, Airflow, Prefect, and Dagster remain the right choice. For lightweight Python jobs without durability needs, Celery is still hard to beat on raw throughput.

Verdict: Is Hatchet Worth It?

For a backend or AI team in 2026 that needs durable background work and is already comfortable operating Postgres, Hatchet is the most pragmatic choice on the market. The free Developer tier is generous enough to ship a real product on, the OSS path is honest and self-hostable, and the cloud pricing scales linearly without surprise. We rate it 83/100 — held back from a higher score only by single-node throughput limits and a still-maturing self-hosted UI. If you’re evaluating Temporal, Inngest, or Trigger.dev for AI agent orchestration, Hatchet deserves to be on the spreadsheet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Hatchet free?

Yes. The Hatchet runner is MIT-licensed and free to self-host. Hatchet Cloud’s Developer tier is free and includes the first 100,000 task runs per month; usage above that is billed at $10 per 1M runs.

Is Hatchet open source?

Yes — the full task queue, DAG engine, durable-execution layer, and dashboard are MIT-licensed at github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet. As of May 2026, the repo has 7,087 stars and is actively maintained by the Hatchet team in New York.

What languages does Hatchet support?

Hatchet provides first-party SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go, and Ruby. The control plane is written in Go and uses Postgres as its only required datastore.

How does Hatchet compare to Temporal?

Both offer durable execution, but Hatchet uses Postgres as its only dependency and exposes a simpler API for plain background tasks — Temporal forces you to write a workflow even for simple queue cases. Hatchet also has no limit on the number of tasks a durable workflow can spawn, where Temporal does.

Can I self-host Hatchet?

Yes. The team publishes a docker-compose stack and a Helm chart, and the Enterprise tier ships with self-host and bring-your-own-cloud support contracts.