Bardeen vs Trigger.dev
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Bardeen and Trigger.dev.
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Verdict: Trigger.dev wins
Trigger.dev scores 4.4/5, edging out Bardeen at 3.3/5. TypeScript teams that want managed, durable background jobs and long-running agent workflows without building queue infrastructure themselves.
Bardeen Automate your browser with AI | Trigger.dev Open-source workflow automation platform for AI agents and integrations | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 3.3 (1 review) | 4.4 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting Price | From $10/mo | Free tier available |
| Best For | Sales, recruiting, and research teams whose work is scraping LinkedIn and company pages, enriching the rows, and pushing them into a CRM or Sheet. | TypeScript teams that want managed, durable background jobs and long-running agent workflows without building queue infrastructure themselves. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | browser extensionno codefree tier | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit Bardeen → | Visit Trigger.dev → |
Bardeen
Pros
- + Credit economics are legible: 1 credit per action row, 3 per enrichment row, exports free — my 40-row LinkedIn pass cost about 160 credits end to end
- + Cloud execution let a 200-row scrape finish unattended while the Chrome extension handled session-gated pages
- + Cheap, honest entry point: Basic at $10/mo with +100 credits, unlimited seats on all plans (bardeen.ai/pricing, captured 2026-07-30)
- + Magic scraper inferred 8 of 10 columns correctly on a structured page in my test, with manual overrides for the rest
- + Strategic backers (Dropbox, HubSpot, Insight Partners) and 300K+ users claimed suggest real usage, not a shelf product
Cons
- - Pricing has whipsawed — $10 (2023), $60 (Dec 2024), $129–$1,500 tiers (Mar 2025), back to $10/$50 (Dec 2025); budget month-to-month
- - Chrome-only browser extension; no Firefox/Safari/Edge support and no self-hosting
- - LinkedIn scraping rides your own session and account limits — platform terms restrict automation, and aggressive volumes risk the account
- - Natural-language playbook generation drafted flows quickly but got a conditional filter wrong in my test; hand-editing was still required
- - Credits expire at the end of each billing period and enrichment rows cost 3 credits each, so real months run well above the sticker credit count
Trigger.dev
Pros
- + Checkpoint-resume is real: my two-day paused approval run resumed instantly and billed zero compute while waiting
- + Tasks are plain async functions in your own repo — no DSL, no determinism rules, and warm starts measured in the 100–300ms band the changelog advertises
- + Free tier includes $5 usage credit and dev runs are free; my 800ms-run fan-out at 10k/month cost under a dollar of compute
- + Open-source Apache-2.0 with the same codebase on Cloud and self-hosted, and an unusually active release line (v4.5.12 as of August 2026)
- + Full workflow surface built in: retries, queues, scheduling, idempotency, priority, lifecycle hooks, wait tokens and AI-SDK tool integration
Cons
- - TypeScript/JavaScript only — Python and Go teams are simply not served
- - Production self-hosting means Postgres, Redis, webapp and worker containers plus a build tunnel; the docs get thin exactly where ops gets hard
- - The plan fee is a usage credit, not a ceiling — LLM-heavy agent runs can outrun the included allowance without cost modelling
- - v3 is shut down on Cloud (old triggers and deploys no longer run), and the v3→v4 migration has sharp edges for busy projects
- - Concurrency and log-retention limits bite early (1-day logs on Free), and the 'AI agents' marketing outruns what is fundamentally an execution platform
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Bardeen or Trigger.dev?▼
Trigger.dev scores higher at 4.4/5 vs 3.3/5 for Bardeen, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Bardeen and Trigger.dev?▼
Bardeen: Bardeen is a Chrome extension for sales teams that scrapes websites like LinkedIn, finds and enriches leads, and sends the data to Google Sheets or your CRM. Credit-based pricing. Trigger.dev: Trigger.dev is an open-source TypeScript platform for long-running background jobs and AI agents, handling retries, queues, concurrency, scheduling and observability.
Is Bardeen or Trigger.dev more affordable?▼
Bardeen starts at €10/mo, Trigger.dev starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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