Celery vs Inngest
Celery
docs.celeryq.devInngest
inngest.comSide by side
| Figure | Celery | Inngest |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $99/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | 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 (#3) |
| Purpose | Celery is a distributed task queue focused on real-time processing that also supports task scheduling. | Inngest orchestrates asynchronous code as durable functions for event driven workflows, background jobs, and agents. |
| Security | Celery advises treating it as an unsafe component and recommends restricting broker access; supported broker backends can use SSL encryption and authentication. | Inngest states it is SOC 2 Type II compliant and offers a signed DPA to customers on paid plans. |
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.
Inngest
Inngest runs asynchronous code as durable functions for event-driven workflows, background jobs, and agents. Its execution steps handle retries, retain state, and recover from failures; traces show activity from trigger to completion. Flow controls manage concurrency and fairness when users compete for resources. Developers can use open-source SDKs for TypeScript, Python, and Go, or the REST API. Functions can run wherever an app is hosted, with deployment guides for services including Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Render, and DigitalOcean. Inngest also describes isolated sandboxes for testing changes and tools for scoring and comparing variants on production traffic. The Free plan includes 5 seats, 50k executions, 500k events ingested, and 24-hour trace history. Execution pauses when the free quota is reached until the account upgrades. Pro starts at $99/mo. Inngest states that it is SOC 2 Type II compliant, and that its US-based databases are encrypted at rest and application traffic uses TLS/SSL in transit.