Happy Valley

Radar vs Trigger.dev

Radar and Trigger.dev are both developer tools tools aimed at developers and small businesses. Trigger.dev costs less, from $10/mo versus $149/mo for Radar. Both have a free plan.

Radar

Open-source Kubernetes UI and MCP server for engineers and agents

Trigger.dev

Open-source platform for durable background jobs and AI agents

PricingOpen source · $149Open source · $10
Starting price$149/mo$10/mo
Free planYesYes
Free trial14 days—
Built forDevelopers, Small businesses, EnterpriseDevelopers, Small businesses, Enterprise
Platformsweb, macos, windows, linuxweb
CountryIL · 2023GB · 2022
Rating——

Choose Radar if

Platform and DevOps teams that want a free open-source Kubernetes UI and a safe way to give AI agents cluster context.

  • Fully featured open-source build under Apache 2.0
  • Single binary and desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux, no account needed
  • Read-only MCP endpoint lets agents inspect clusters safely

Look elsewhere if: Teams that need full-stack metrics, logs and APM in one hosted suite (Datadog, Dynatrace).

Choose Trigger.dev if

TypeScript teams that need reliable long-running jobs and AI agents with retries, queues and observability built in.

  • Apache-2.0 open source with a self-hosting option
  • Waiting time on waitpoints is not billed
  • Generous observability for each run

Look elsewhere if: Non-developers or teams working mainly in Python or other languages (Windmill, Pipedream).

Radar vs Trigger.dev pricing

Radar

  • Radar OSS$0Apache 2.0, unlimited clusters, one cluster at a time
  • Cloud Free$03 hosted clusters, unlimited users, 100 investigations/mo
  • Team$149/cluster/moScoped RBAC, fleet cost rollup; 20% off annual contracts
  • Enterprise$299/cluster/moSSO, SCIM, SIEM export, self-managed; 20% off annual contracts
  • CustomCustomAnnual contract, air-gapped, data residency, 99.9% SLA

Trigger.dev

  • Free$0$5 usage included, 20 concurrent runs, 1-day log retention
  • Hobby$10/mo$10 usage included, 50 concurrent runs, 7-day logs
  • Pro$50/mo$50 usage included, 200+ concurrent runs, 25+ seats
  • EnterpriseCustomRBAC, SSO, SOC 2 report, priority support

Radar · Key features

  • Issues queue that groups failures by root cause and blast radius
  • Live topology graph and resource browser for any conformant cluster
  • Event and change timeline with diffs beyond the one-hour default
  • Helm release views with upgrades and rollbacks
  • Argo CD and Flux drift detection, diagnosis and sync
  • Cluster audit with 44 best-practice checks

Cons

  • Per-cluster pricing gets expensive for large fleets
  • Radar Cloud SSO and SCIM only on the $299 Enterprise plan
  • Team plan keeps just 3 days of timeline history

Trigger.dev · Key features

  • Durable TypeScript tasks with no timeouts, retries and checkpointing
  • Queues and concurrency controls with per-key overrides
  • Cron schedules and waitpoints for human approval up to 90 days
  • Realtime run updates and LLM streaming to the frontend
  • Verified, deduplicated webhooks that trigger up to 25 agents
  • Slack and Linear integrations for chat-driven agents

Cons

  • TypeScript and JavaScript SDK only
  • Webhooks are still in public beta
  • Usage-based compute makes bills harder to predict

Radar vs Trigger.dev: FAQ

Which is cheaper, Radar or Trigger.dev?

Trigger.dev starts at $10/mo and Radar at $149/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.

Do Radar and Trigger.dev have a free plan?

Yes, both Radar and Trigger.dev have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.

Not sure yet?