Hatchet
Orchestration engine for background tasks, AI agents, and durable workflows
About
Hatchet is an open-source (MIT) orchestration engine for background tasks, durable workflows, and AI agents. You define tasks and DAG workflows as code in Python, TypeScript, Go, or Ruby; workers pull work from a durable queue with automatic retries, checkpointing, and replay.
It deploys as a service (engine + API + dashboard) on top of Postgres — no Kafka/ZooKeeper cluster to operate — and offers a managed cloud with the same application code. A strong fit for teams that want Temporal-style durability without operating a Temporal cluster.
What it can do
- • Durable tasks with automatic retries, checkpointing, and replay from a durable event log
- • DAG workflows with step dependencies, fan-out/fan-in, and conditional execution
- • Event-driven triggers plus cron/scheduled runs
- • Fair-share scheduling, priorities, and worker slot control for multi-tenant workloads
- • Real-time dashboard: run visualization, logs, alerting
- • SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go, Ruby; workers authenticate over gRPC with API tokens
- • AI-agent oriented: automatic checkpointing of long-running agent invocations
Setup
- Install the Hatchet CLI:
curl -fsSL https://install.hatchet.run/install.sh | bash(macOS/Linux/WSL) orbrew install hatchet-dev/hatchet/hatchet --cask(macOS). Verify withhatchet --version. - Start a local engine (requires Docker):
hatchet server start— this spins up Postgres and the Hatchet server, dashboard on http://localhost:8888. - Install an SDK in your app (e.g.
pip install hatchet-sdkornpm install @hatchet-dev/typescript) and write a worker. - Create an API token for the worker in the dashboard under Settings → API Tokens, then run your worker against the local instance.
- Optional: silence CLI telemetry with
export HATCHET_CLI_TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false(see docs.hatchet.run CLI reference).
Prerequisites
Docker (for `hatchet server start`); Hatchet Lite needs nothing else — it uses Postgres as both DB and queue. Full production self-host uses Postgres + RabbitMQ via the provided docker-compose.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 8,105 GitHub stars (log-scaled vs catalog peers); last push 0d ago; 100 releases/12mo; 142 open issues. Manual review: CLI telemetry on by default (opt-out); --disable-auth dev image has fixed worker token. License: MIT.
★ 8,105 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.4/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.3/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 10.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 9.0/10
- · 8,105 GitHub stars (log-scaled vs catalog peers)
- · last push 0d ago; 100 releases/12mo; 142 open issues
- · manual review: CLI telemetry on by default (opt-out); --disable-auth dev image has fixed worker token
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.