Run and scale agents.

A web request lives for milliseconds and holds no state. An agent runs for hours or days, runs code it wrote a moment ago, keeps files and memory that must survive a restart, and there is one per user, task, or conversation. Containers and VMs are too heavy to run that many, and serverless functions forget everything between calls. A Rivet Actor is an isolated, durable process built for exactly this, and it runs inside your backend.

No. Actors run inside the Node.js or Bun process you already run, on your servers; the SDK is a library you import. The control plane that schedules and routes them is a single binary you run yourself, or Rivet Cloud runs it for you.

Yes. Rivet deploys into your own cloud account, including air-gapped environments: the control plane and storage run inside your VPC while Rivet operates them. See the BYOC docs.

Yes. Rivet Cloud is fully managed. It can run your Actors for you on Rivet Compute, with preview deployments and auto-scaling in edge regions, or you can bring your own nodes and run Actors on your compute while Rivet Cloud provides the control plane and routing layer.

Yes. Rivet is fully self-hostable; see the self-hosting docs. For enterprise support with a self-hosted deployment, contact us.

Yes. Rivet is open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The source is on GitHub.

Rivet runs stateful Actors inside your backend. Think of an Actor like a pod, but much smaller, more lightweight, and faster to start. Each Actor also comes with SQLite for structured persistence, instead of or in addition to a filesystem, which gives it more flexibility than a Kubernetes pod.

Rivet is often used as an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Durable Objects that is easy to self-host and scales. It also fixes many of the constraints of Durable Objects: no 128 MB memory cap, no 10 GB SQLite limit, Actors are not randomly evicted, and you control the runtime because Actors run on vanilla Node.js or Bun instead of a custom runtime. Rivet also adds built-in connection handling, event broadcasting, durable scheduling and cron, full Vitest support, lifecycle hooks for draining, and control over Actor upgrades. See the Cloudflare Durable Objects comparison.

No. Rivet runs on native Node.js and Bun, so your existing packages, tooling, and tests work unchanged.

Yes. Rivet supports Bun in addition to Node.js.

Yes. Rivet Actors work with Effect; see the Effect agent example.

Rivet implements the virtual actor pattern, which is closest to Orleans, but focuses on what modern workloads need: SQLite persistence instead of simple JSON stores, multi-region routing, and support for modern runtimes. Erlang and Akka do not provide virtual actors out of the box, though ecosystem packages exist that offer functionality comparable to Rivet Actors.

No. Rivet only needs a standard process that connects to the control plane over WebSocket. That process can be Node.js, Bun, Rust, or anything else.