Welcome to Motia

Build production-grade backends with a single primitive. APIs, background jobs, workflows, AI agents, streaming, state management, and observability — unified in one framework.

Motia is a unified backend framework where everything is built around one core primitive: the Step. Instead of juggling separate frameworks for APIs, queues, cron jobs, AI agents, and real-time streaming, you write Steps — simple files with a config and a handler — and Motia connects them automatically.

import type { Handlers, StepConfig } from 'motia'
 
export const config = {
  name: 'CreateUser',
  triggers: [{ type: 'http', method: 'POST', path: '/users' }],
  enqueues: ['user.created'],
  flows: ['onboarding'],
} as const satisfies StepConfig
 
export const handler: Handlers<typeof config> = async (req, { enqueue, logger }) => {
  logger.info('Creating user', { email: req.body.email })
  await enqueue({ topic: 'user.created', data: req.body })
  return { status: 201, body: { success: true } }
}

Drop this file in your project and Motia auto-discovers it. No registration, no boilerplate wiring.

What You Get

Motia gives you a complete backend toolkit from a single primitive:

Capability	How It Works
HTTP APIs	Steps with `http` triggers become REST endpoints with validation and routing
Background Jobs	Steps with `queue` triggers process messages asynchronously with retries
Scheduled Tasks	Steps with `cron` triggers run on a schedule
Reactive Workflows	Steps with `state` or `stream` triggers react to data changes automatically
AI Agents	Build agentic workflows with streaming support and tool calling
State Management	Built-in key-value storage shared across all Steps, with atomic updates
Real-Time Streaming	Push live updates to connected clients via WebSocket streams
Observability	Structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics out of the box
Multi-Language	Write Steps in TypeScript, Python, or JavaScript — they all work together

Powered by iii

Motia runs on the iii engine, which manages all infrastructure concerns — queues, pub/sub, state storage, stream servers, cron scheduling, and observability — through a single config.yaml file. You focus on business logic in your Steps; iii handles the rest.

Prerequisites

iii — Install the runtime: curl -fsSL https://install.iii.dev/iii/main/install.sh | sh
Node.js 18+ — Required for TypeScript/JavaScript Steps
Python 3 — Optional, for Python Steps

What You Get

Powered by iii

Prerequisites

Get Started

Quick Start

Core Concepts

Why Motia?

Examples

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