Background jobs — cron → CF Workers → Prefect → Temporal → Trigger.dev
2026-02-21 summary infrastructuretemporalprefectcroncloudflarebackground-jobspipelines
Key Takeaways
5 tools for background jobs, ordered by complexity. Rule: start with cron, move up only when you need to.
| Tool | When | Complexity |
|---|---|---|
| Cron | Simple schedule, < 30 sec, no retry | Lowest |
| CF Workers Cron | Edge function, JS/TS/Python, CF Pages already deployed | Low |
| Prefect | Python ETL/ML pipelines, need visual UI | Medium |
| Temporal | Parallel tasks, retry, observability, multi-project VPS | High |
| Trigger.dev | TS/JS, serverless, long-running AI, managed | High |
Decision: one simple task → cron. Need observability + retry → Temporal. Need Python pipeline UI → Prefect. Serverless TS → Trigger.dev.
Connections
- infra-two-tools — background jobs are the orchestration layer on top of SST/Pulumi infra
- one-pain-one-feature-launch — start with cron, don’t over-engineer the job system before validating the product