Cadenya vs Trigger.dev: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of Cadenya and Trigger.dev — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

Cadenya

Paid

A managed agent runtime that layers your tools, agents and objectives so teams can test agent behavior safely and iterate fast.

Unified Tool Layer: Connect MCP servers, OpenAPI specs and existing endpoints once, and expose them to every agent through a single managed interface.
Model-Agnostic Variations: Set a default model and run canary variations on other providers side by side to compare behaviors before promoting a change.
Progressive Tool Discovery: Tool schemas stay out of the context window until an agent asks for them, with configurable max tools per search, search hints and a rerank threshold, so every request gets smaller.
Live Token Metering: Track cost as it accrues across loops, active variations, memory entries and widgets, so usage is visible rather than discovered on the invoice.
Webhooks and SSE Streaming: Push agent events — assistant messages, tool results, approval requests, sub-agent spawns, compaction, timeouts — into your own apps in real time.
Memory Layers: Attach stored documents such as playbooks and policy sets to an agent so its guidance persists across objectives.
Outcome Feedback Scoring: Collect scored comments on each objective, attributed to the variation and model that produced it, to see which behaviors actually work.
Embeddable Widgets: Drop an agent experience into any frontend as a widget rather than building the conversational surface yourself.

Operational Exception Handling: Run an agent that detects stalled shipments or orders and reroutes them through your dispatch API within policy.
Safe Model Migration: Evaluate a new frontier model as a canary variation against live objectives before switching the default.
Wrapping Existing APIs: Turn internal OpenAPI endpoints into agent-callable tools without rewriting the services behind them.
Embedding Agent Chat in a Product: Ship a conversational agent surface into an existing frontend using widgets instead of building it in-house.
Cost Control at Scale: Use progressive discovery and live metering to keep context size and per-loop cost down as agent traffic grows.
Agent Quality Review: Compare scored feedback across variations to understand which prompt or model changes improved real outcomes.

Trigger.dev, Inc.

Freemium

Open-source TypeScript platform for durable AI agents and long-running workflows with no timeouts, plus queues, retries, and observability.

No-timeout task runtime: Tasks run for as long as they need — hours if necessary — unlike Lambda or Vercel functions, making it usable for long-running agents and heavy batch jobs.
Durable AI agents: Chat agents survive tab closes, refreshes, redeploys, and crashes because their execution state is checkpointed by the platform.
Streaming to the frontend: Stream tokens or intermediate step output straight to your UI with no extra API routes to build or maintain.
Tool calling and human-in-the-loop: First-class primitives for LLM tool calls and for pausing runs on human approval before continuing.
Queues, retries, idempotency: Built-in job queues, retry policies, and idempotency keys so you don't hand-roll reliability around every AI call.
Self-host or managed cloud: Apache 2.0 core with a documented self-hosting path, plus a managed cloud for teams that want elastic scale without ops.

Long-running chat agents: Support or research chat agents that keep working across sessions and stream results back to the browser once the user returns.
Multi-step LLM pipelines: RAG pipelines that fan out to hundreds of documents, retry failed calls, and finish minutes or hours later without a client staying connected.
Human-in-the-loop workflows: Agents that draft output, pause for a human approval step in Slack or a web UI, and resume automatically once approved.
Batch AI processing: Nightly jobs that classify, embed, or transform thousands of records with automatic queueing and observability.
Backend for autonomous agents: Serves as the durable execution layer for autonomous agents built with the OpenAI Agents SDK, Vercel AI SDK, or custom orchestration.