Celery

Distributed task processing with focus on routing, composition, and failure handling.

When Not to Use Celery

Before adopting Celery, check if you actually need it:

Scenario	Better Alternative
Short-lived fan-out (5-10 parallel HTTP calls)	Simple thread pool or `asyncio.gather`
Single-server Django app with moderate load	Django 6.0+ built-in task queue
Work dominated by long IO (10+ min tasks)	Task-per-request model or job queue (dramatiq, huey)
Operational overhead unacceptable	django-tasks, RQ, or simple database polling

Check before adopting:

Do you need multiple workers across machines? (If no → simpler queue)
Do you have 100+ tasks/minute sustained? (If no → overkill)
Can you tolerate operational cost (broker + worker fleet + monitoring)? (If no → huey/dramatiq)