Hatchet

Overview

Hatchet is an open-source distributed task queue and workflow engine. Define workflows as DAGs (directed acyclic graphs), run steps with automatic retries and timeouts, control concurrency, and trigger workflows from events or schedules. Like Temporal but lighter, like BullMQ but with workflow orchestration. Built for background jobs that need reliability: payment processing, data pipelines, AI agent orchestration.

When to Use

• Background jobs that need reliability (retries, timeouts, idempotency)
• Multi-step workflows (onboarding, order processing, data pipelines)
• Fan-out/fan-in patterns (process items in parallel, aggregate results)
• Rate-limited API calls (concurrency control per workflow)
• Replacing BullMQ/Celery with something more structured

Instructions

Setup