# Celery

> BSD-3-Clause distributed task queue for Python, on RabbitMQ or Redis

**Category:** Python  
**Pricing:** open-source  
**URL:** https://docs.celeryq.dev  
**GitHub:** https://github.com/celery/celery  
**Added:** 2026-10-21

---

## The Hook

Celery runs Python functions as background jobs on worker processes, with retries, scheduled (beat) tasks and chains of tasks, using RabbitMQ or Redis as the broker.

## What's Good

BSD-3-Clause (celery/celery), stable 5.6.3 (2026-03-26), 5.7.0rc1 (2026-10-18), commit on 2026-10-20. ★~29k, developed since 2009. Useful for the classic web-app jobs, such as emails, reports and image processing, especially next to Django.

## The Catch

You run and tune a broker, and the delivery settings (acks, prefetch, visibility timeout on Redis) are a common cause of duplicated or lost tasks. Windows is not officially supported. For long multi-step workflows a durable engine like Temporal or Hatchet fits better. GitHub shows NOASSERTION only because the LICENSE file has extra text; it is BSD-3-Clause.

## Verdict

The default Python job queue; read the delivery docs before going to production.