Celery vs Hangfire
Celery
docs.celeryq.devHangfire
hangfire.ioSide by side
| Figure | Celery | Hangfire |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $41.67/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Task Queue Software | 8.1 (#11) | 9.1 (#2) |
| License | Celery is open source and licensed under the New BSD License. | Hangfire Core is open source under LGPLv3 and free for commercial use. |
| Purpose | Celery is a distributed task queue focused on real-time processing that also supports task scheduling. | Hangfire performs background processing in .NET and .NET Core applications without requiring a Windows Service or separate process. |
Plans
In their own words
Celery
Celery is a free, open-source distributed task queue for real-time processing and scheduled jobs. It sends task messages through a broker to worker processes, and systems can run multiple workers and brokers for high availability and horizontal scaling. Celery Beat starts tasks at regular intervals for available workers. Documented transports include RabbitMQ, Redis, Amazon SQS, Kafka and Google Pub/Sub, with different capability labels: RabbitMQ and Redis are stable, SQS is stable without monitoring or remote control, and Kafka is experimental without those features. Integrations are documented for Django, Pyramid, Pylons, Flask, web2py, Tornado and FastAPI. Commands inspect and manage workers, while Flower and event utilities provide monitoring options. Celery 5.6 supports Python 3.9 through 3.13 and PyPy 3.9 or newer. It is self-hosted, installable via PyPI or source, and licensed under the New BSD License.
Hangfire
Hangfire runs background jobs in.NET and.NET Core applications without requiring a Windows Service or a separate process. It supports fire-and-forget, delayed and recurring jobs, as well as continuations, and stores jobs persistently. SQL Server and Redis are officially supported storage options, with other community-driven implementations also available. A built-in web dashboard shows processing activity and each job's state. Hangfire describes its processing as at-least-once, with automatic retries after unhandled exceptions or application termination. It can run across multiple machines and coordinates their work automatically. Listed integrations include ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, console applications, Windows Services, WCF, Nancy and ServiceStack. Hangfire Core is open source under LGPLv3 and free for commercial use. The Open plan is free. Startup costs $500 a year, Business $1,500 a year, and Enterprise $4,500 a year, all billed per organization annually. Pro adds batches and batch continuations; Ace adds throttling features for concurrency and rate limits. Dashboard access is local by default, so remote access needs authorization configuration.