Quilter vs Trigger.dev
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Quilter and Trigger.dev.
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Verdict: Trigger.dev wins
Trigger.dev scores 4.4/5, edging out Quilter at 4.0/5. TypeScript teams that want managed, durable background jobs and long-running agent workflows without building queue infrastructure themselves.
Quilter AI-powered PCB design automation for engineers | Trigger.dev Open-source workflow automation platform for AI agents and integrations | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 4.0 (1 review) | 4.4 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best For | Hardware teams with real layout bottlenecks — startups and mid-size electronics firms iterating multiple boards — that use Altium, Allegro, Xpedition or KiCad and want to trade weeks of manual placement and routing for hours of candidate review. | 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 | free tier | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit Quilter → | Visit Trigger.dev → |
Quilter
Pros
- + Per-project billing counts only unrouted pins at upload — in my test a pre-routed power section correctly reduced the design pin count, letting engineers hand off tedious routing while keeping critical RF/power work themselves
- + Unlimited free iterations per project (within 10% BOM change) plus parallel jobs meant comparing a 4-layer and 6-layer variant of one board overnight at no extra cost
- + Outputs land in native Altium, Cadence Allegro, Siemens Xpedition or KiCad formats — no proprietary lock-in, and files opened cleanly for DRC and fab prep
- + The two-to-five-cycle expectation and the circuit comprehension report are honest about where human review stays mandatory, versus one-shot-layout marketing elsewhere in this category
- + Deployment flexibility with a managed AWS cloud (SOC 2 Type 2, isolated workspaces) or self-hosted option where board data never leaves your infrastructure
Cons
- - No public per-board prices — cost is a sales conversation despite the transparent pin-count model, so budgeting is opaque before first contact
- - Free-tier designs may be made public, which excludes confidential work from the zero-cost path
- - A BOM change beyond 10% of the upload starts a new billable project, which penalises respun designs
- - Automated layout is not design validation: DRC-clean candidates still need thermal, EMC and DFM review, and the vendor's own guidance expects 2–5 iteration cycles
- - Supports four ECAD tools for output; teams on Eagle, Proteus or browser-based suites face import friction, and the company is young enough that its long-term track record is still being built
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, Quilter or Trigger.dev?▼
Trigger.dev scores higher at 4.4/5 vs 4.0/5 for Quilter, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Quilter and Trigger.dev?▼
Quilter: Quilter automates printed circuit board placement and routing using physics simulation, producing layout candidates that work with Altium, Cadence and Xpedition. 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 Quilter or Trigger.dev more affordable?▼
Quilter starts at €0/mo, Trigger.dev starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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