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Hatchet vs Windmill

Hatchet scores higher on the AgentReady, 66/100 against 64/100. They differ on 7 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Hatchet. Hatchet is a developer platform that helps engineering teams build and deploy mission-critical AI agents, durable workflows, and background tasks.

Windmill. Windmill is a fast, open-source workflow engine and developer platform.

Where Hatchet is ahead

Hatchet passes mcp discoverable, and Windmill does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds adopt: no mandatory sales call and mcp integration available. Windmill misses those.

And on operate, idempotency support. Windmill misses it.

Where Windmill is ahead

Windmill passes structured api reference, and Hatchet does not. That is understand, whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it.

It also holds adopt: agent-compatible signup flow and cli available. Hatchet misses those.

What neither does

Both fail openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, programmatic credential creation, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, rate-limit behavior predictable. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Hatchet leads 100 to 87. Hatchet misses nothing; Windmill misses mcp discoverable.

Understand is whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it. Windmill leads 46 to 31. Hatchet misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented; Windmill misses openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented.

Adopt. Hatchet leads 75 to 67. Hatchet misses agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, cli available; Windmill misses no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available.

Operate. Hatchet leads 59 to 56. Hatchet misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, rate-limit behavior predictable; Windmill misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable.

Pricing

Hatchet starts at $0/mo and has a free tier. Windmill does not publish one and has a free tier.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Hatchet clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Hatchet and Windmill. Alternatives to each: Hatchet, Windmill.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["hatchet", "windmill"]}