# Celery

33 Hacker News commenters recommended Celery and 38 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it as a mature, easy-to-start distributed task queue for background jobs and high message volumes; the most common caveat is a complicated interface that is hard to debug.

## Why people recommend it

- Easy to get started (3 comments): "is already mature, easy, and can be setup quickly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445273)) "Celery is really easy to get started with." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46085583)) "not that Celery is difficult to get setup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45805969))
- Handles high message volumes reliably (3 comments): "We processed double-digit millions of messages daily with Celery + RabbitMQ without major obstacles." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46216187)) "Celery is a simple, flexible, and reliable distributed system to process vast amounts of messages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805015)) "It worked. It didn't require handholding. It continued working after I left there." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46907565))
- Works well with Django and Python (3 comments): "I found celery to mostly match my expectations. I used it in a couple of django apps. My only real foot gun was around having to set an EAGER setting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643997)) "I use a combination or channels and celery for a few projects and it’s works great." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45802716)) "I've built pretty scalable things using nothing but Python, Celery and Postgres" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833398))

## What people warn about

- Buggy workers and lost connections (2 comments): "We have periodic problems with celery: workers losing connection with RabbitMQ, Celery itself getting stuck" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46085604)) "it was so buggy and so troublesome that at some point we switched to a hastily hacked own solution" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806328))
- Poor docs and missing basic features (2 comments): "Things like chaining, groups, named queues just don't work the way you'd think they would." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48642666)) "It was so badly documented and failed to do basic things I would expect from a task queue" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45803765))
- Extra infrastructure overhead (2 comments): "Celery requires seperate containers or nodes, which complicates things unnecessarily." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805701)) "managing the infrastructure overhead of Celery or Ray is a massive time sink" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376168))
- Lock-in and hidden complexity (2 comments): "it traps you into celery which is just python or whatever language happens to create a celery compatible message structure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622366)) "Celery has way too much magic crammed into it, it is very annoying to debug, and produces interesting bugs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219476))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Oban](https://hackerapproved.com/p/oban.md): 39 recommend
- [Solid Queue](https://hackerapproved.com/p/solidqueue.md): 22 recommend
- [Sidekiq](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sidekiq.md): 14 recommend
- [Django background tasks](https://hackerapproved.com/p/django-background-tasks.md): 9 recommend
- [BullMQ](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bullmq.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Celery", https://hackerapproved.com/p/celery/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).