Celery
Ranked 2 of 8 job queue libraries by recommenders
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.
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.
71 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 33
- criticize it
- 38
- approval share
- 46%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 33 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Easy to get started
“is already mature, easy, and can be setup quickly”
Comment from 19 Mar 2026 in “What if Python was natively distributable?” “Celery is really easy to get started with.”
Comment from 29 Nov 2025 in “A first look at Django's new background tasks” “not that Celery is difficult to get setup”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “Why we migrated from Python to Node.js” Handles high message volumes reliably
“We processed double-digit millions of messages daily with Celery + RabbitMQ without major obstacles.”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Django: what’s new in 6.0” “Celery is a simple, flexible, and reliable distributed system to process vast amounts of messages”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python” “It worked. It didn't require handholding. It continued working after I left there.”
Comment from 6 Feb 2026 in “AI Is Killing B2B SaaS” Works well with Django and Python
“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”
Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “In Praise of Memcached” “I use a combination or channels and celery for a few projects and it’s works great.”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “Why we migrated from Python to Node.js” “I've built pretty scalable things using nothing but Python, Celery and Postgres”
Comment from 6 Nov 2025 in “What the hell have you built”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Buggy workers and lost connections
“We have periodic problems with celery: workers losing connection with RabbitMQ, Celery itself getting stuck”
Comment from 29 Nov 2025 in “A first look at Django's new background tasks” “it was so buggy and so troublesome that at some point we switched to a hastily hacked own solution”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Why we migrated from Python to Node.js” Poor docs and missing basic features
“Things like chaining, groups, named queues just don't work the way you'd think they would.”
Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “In Praise of Memcached” “It was so badly documented and failed to do basic things I would expect from a task queue”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “Why we migrated from Python to Node.js” Extra infrastructure overhead
“Celery requires seperate containers or nodes, which complicates things unnecessarily.”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python” “managing the infrastructure overhead of Celery or Ray is a massive time sink”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: I built Wool, a lightweight distributed Python runtime” Lock-in and hidden complexity
“it traps you into celery which is just python or whatever language happens to create a celery compatible message structure”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “What if Python was natively distributable?” “Celery has way too much magic crammed into it, it is very annoying to debug, and produces interesting bugs.”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Django: what’s new in 6.0”
Other job queue libraries people recommend
The four most recommended other job queue libraries, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oban | 39 | 8 | 83% | 8 | — | Approved |
| CeleryThis page | 33 | 38 | 46% | 8 | — | — |
| Solid Queue | 22 | 3 | 88% | 5 | — | Approved |
| Sidekiq | 14 | 3 | 82% | 7 | — | Approved |
| Django background tasks | 9 | 3 | 75% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 75 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“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”
“Things like chaining, groups, named queues just don't work the way you'd think they would.”
“If one has a stateful message queue or job task queue, e.g. RabbitMQ or Celery, one can use it.”
“Just use infrastructure that's made by people who know what they are doing.”
“Reliable signals via Celery side-effects enqueued inside the DB transaction so rollbacks are respected.”
“I'm going to stick with pydantic ai and dbos/temporal/celery.”
“it traps you into celery which is just python or whatever language happens to create a celery compatible message structure”
“is already mature, easy, and can be setup quickly”
“managing the infrastructure overhead of Celery or Ray is a massive time sink”
“Having a separate container/deployment for celery, the web server, etc is nice so you can deploy and scale separately”
“Using Celery canvas to compose signatures is a great step”
“It worked. It didn't require handholding. It continued working after I left there.”
“you'd probably use Celery or numpy or ctypes to do this much faster.”
“My top problem with my celery setup has always been visibility.”
“Celery requires seperate containers or nodes, which complicates things unnecessarily.”
“Celery is a simple, flexible, and reliable distributed system to process vast amounts of messages”
“Celery's interface kind of sucks, but I'm used to it already”
“I like celery but I started to try other things when I had projects doing work from languages in addition to python.”
“It's just a bit harder to get it to do certain things and requires a bit more coding”
“These things are incredibly annoying to implement over top of Celery.”
“migrating back to LangGraph and Celery just to ensure reliability”
“I've been relying heavily on LangGraph and Celery to manage state”
“some names that come to mind are Celery and Windows”
“Celery has way too much magic crammed into it, it is very annoying to debug, and produces interesting bugs.”
“We processed double-digit millions of messages daily with Celery + RabbitMQ without major obstacles.”
“Celery kinda sucks, but would I build a business on it? Yeah sure”
“You will have to keep Celery for the foreseeable future.”
“Celery with the Redis backend seemed pretty solid.”
“We have periodic problems with celery: workers losing connection with RabbitMQ, Celery itself getting stuck”
“Celery is really easy to get started with.”
“I imagine I'll continue using Celery in most cases but being able to transparently swap back-ends”
“I've built pretty scalable things using nothing but Python, Celery and Postgres”
“it was so buggy and so troublesome that at some point we switched to a hastily hacked own solution”
“not that Celery is difficult to get setup”
“Celery is decent for long running, background, or fire and forget tasks”
“Just because you couldn't figure it out doesn't mean the capability wasn't there.”
“You need to use a distributed task queue like celery.”
“It was so badly documented and failed to do basic things I would expect from a task queue”
“I use a combination or channels and celery for a few projects and it’s works great.”
“not considering Celery as an alternative to Django + async really is the missing puzzle piece here”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.