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Hatchet vs Trigger.dev

Hatchet scores higher on the AgentReady, 66/100 against 60/100. They differ on 6 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Hatchet. Hatchet is a developer platform that helps engineering teams build and deploy mission-critical AI agents, durable workflows, and background tasks.

Trigger.dev. Trigger.dev is an open source background jobs framework and platform for building AI workflows in TypeScript.

Where Hatchet is ahead

Hatchet passes no mandatory sales call and free trial or free allowance, and Trigger.dev does not. That is adopt, whether an agent can get a key and make its first successful call without a human in the loop.

It also holds operate: idempotency support and agent compatibility verified. Trigger.dev misses those.

Where Trigger.dev is ahead

Trigger.dev passes authentication documented, and Hatchet does not. That is understand, whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it.

It also holds adopt: cli available. Hatchet misses it.

What neither does

Both fail structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, rate-limit behavior predictable. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Understand. Trigger.dev leads 38 to 31. Hatchet misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented; Trigger.dev misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented.

Adopt. Hatchet leads 75 to 65. Hatchet misses agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, cli available; Trigger.dev misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance.

Operate is whether an agent can run against it in production and recover when a call fails. Hatchet leads 59 to 35. Hatchet misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, rate-limit behavior predictable; Trigger.dev misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified.

Pricing

Hatchet starts at $0/mo and has a free tier. Trigger.dev does not publish one.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Hatchet clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Hatchet and Trigger.dev. Alternatives to each: Hatchet, Trigger.dev.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["hatchet", "trigger"]}