# Oban

39 Hacker News commenters recommended Oban and 8 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for background jobs on Elixir and Postgres at scale, with simple setup and no extra infrastructure. Main caveat: some core features sit behind the paid Pro tier.

## Why people recommend it

- Handles very high job volumes (4 comments): "we've written about running one million jobs a minute on a single queue, and there are numerous companies running hundreds of millions of jobs a day with oban/postgres" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800443)) "in follow-up research we've sustained 12k/s with a p99 under ~100ms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114728)) "Their benchmark shows a million jobs per minute on a single node" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614403))
- Needs no extra infrastructure beyond Postgres (2 comments): "it’s so much simpler than spinning up another piece of infrastructure like Kafka or rabbitmq" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46762338)) "a lot of postgres envs are not going to have pgmq, so just use Oban" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073236))
- Reliable and well engineered (4 comments): "I can basically have a guarantee that some complex process will run eventually" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706365)) "Support only options aren't going to cut it in our experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800010)) "a production service largely backed by Oban Pro" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49540649))
- Rich features like workflows and crons (2 comments): "what Oban supports with workflows, crons, partitioning, dependent jobs, failure handling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799674)) "covers a lot of the celery feature set and is free as well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46806596))

## What people warn about

- Core features gated behind Pro tier (7 comments): "some fairly core features are gated behind a Pro tier" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800154)) "This feels like core functionality is locked away, and the opensource part is nothing more than a shareware, or demo/learning version." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46801489)) "That's a feature that I think shouldn't be gated behind a monthly pro subscription" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46801382))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Celery](https://hackerapproved.com/p/celery.md): 33 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, "Oban", https://hackerapproved.com/p/oban/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).