Skyvern vs Trigger.dev
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Skyvern and Trigger.dev.
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Verdict: Trigger.dev wins
Trigger.dev scores 4.4/5, edging out Skyvern at 4.0/5. TypeScript teams that want managed, durable background jobs and long-running agent workflows without building queue infrastructure themselves.
Skyvern AI browser agent for workflow automation | 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 | Developers and ops teams automating login-gated, dynamic, CAPTCHA-protected browser workflows that keep breaking traditional scripts. | 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 | open sourcefree tierapi accessbyok | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit Skyvern → | Visit Trigger.dev → |
Skyvern
Pros
- + Vision-driven navigation survives UI changes that break selector-based scripts — layout drift in my test did not stop a run
- + Per-step run traces explain what the agent did and why, which turns failures into diagnoses instead of guesswork
- + Native CAPTCHA and 2FA/TOTP handling removes the two flows that most automation tools refuse to touch
- + Open-source AGPL core with a documented Docker self-host path for teams that cannot send credentials to a cloud vendor
- + Credit sizing is transparent: the pricing page publishes estimated action counts per tier (~170 / ~1,200 / ~6,200)
Cons
- - Per-action cost is inherently higher than scripted automation — each step carries LLM round trips, and self-hosters pay their own LLM API bills
- - Free tier (5,000 credits, 1 concurrent run) is an evaluation tier; team workspaces and 2FA support start at $149/month
- - Reliability on the hardest bot-protected and rate-limited sites is not something I would stake an SLA on despite native CAPTCHA solving
- - Seed-stage company with a small team; funding figures conflict across databases ($728K vs $2.7M) and long-term support is an open question
- - Not the right tool for high-volume extraction over stable pages, where a plain scraper is faster and far cheaper
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, Skyvern or Trigger.dev?▼
Trigger.dev scores higher at 4.4/5 vs 4.0/5 for Skyvern, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Skyvern and Trigger.dev?▼
Skyvern: Open-source AI browser automation agent that can navigate complex websites, extract data, and complete workflows using LLMs and computer vision. 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 Skyvern or Trigger.dev more affordable?▼
Skyvern starts at €0/mo, Trigger.dev starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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