Inngest vs Orkes Conductor Human tasks

Inngest

Waits are durable and cost nothing while suspended, with runs up to 30 days on Free and 366 on Business. No reviewer inbox, Slack app or email, so the human side is your code.

Orkes Conductor Human tasks

Escalation chains with a time limit per assignee and a choice of leaving the task open or failing the workflow. No built-in Slack or email prompt, so alerts need a trigger policy and a second workflow.

Inngest

1. Use step.waitForSignal() when one run waits for one answer, and waitForEvent only when one answer resumes many runs
2. Register the wait before you send the approval request, or check the external state first, since early events are missed
3. Use a unique approval ID per tool call and match on it, so parallel approvals resolve independently
4. Treat null or undefined as a timeout and decide on purpose whether that rejects, approves or escalates
5. Set an event id when sending the answer, so a retried send is dropped within 24 hours

Orkes Conductor Human tasks

1. Give every assignment you want to escalate from a non-zero slaMinutes, since 0 never expires and nothing can follow it
2. Pick TERMINATE for risky actions so an unanswered approval fails the workflow instead of staying open to anyone
3. Start approval workflows with an idempotencyKey and RETURN_EXISTING, so a retried start doesn't ask twice
4. Refresh the JWT from /api/token with a set expiry instead of requesting one that never expires
5. Fetch single doc pages, not llms.txt, which is the whole documentation in 2.57 MB