IronWorker vs RQ (Redis Queue)

IronWorker is a container-based platform for running custom code as queued, asynchronous background tasks. It supports parallel processing, and jobs can run once, a set number of times or on a recurring schedule. Workers run in Docker containers and support Ruby, Python, PHP, Java,.NET, Node.js and Go. Tasks can be triggered by HTTP POST webhooks, other workers or IronMQ queues; the Iron.io dashboard displays task status and performance. The platform describes SSL connections, isolated Docker sandboxes and OAuth2 for task execution. Deployment choices include shared, dedicated, hybrid and on-premise environments. Listed uses include image and video processing, push notifications, ETL, email delivery and cron replacement. Basic costs nothing and includes five hours per month, one concurrency, 512 MB RAM and a 30-minute runtime. Standard costs $169 a month and includes unlimited hours with ten concurrency. Premium costs $699 a month. A 14-day trial is available only for non-dedicated clusters.

RQ (Redis Queue) is a Python library for placing jobs in queues and running them asynchronously in background worker processes. It is self-hosted, open source under the BSD license, and free. It requires Redis 5 or later, or Valkey 7.2 or later. RQ supports scheduled and repeating jobs, retries, bulk enqueueing, job groups, dependencies, unique jobs, and concurrency rate limits. Unique jobs cannot be combined with dependencies. Failed jobs are recorded with exception information, and custom exception handlers are supported. For monitoring, there is an `rq info` console command; RQ Dashboard is a separate web-based frontend. Documentation covers Django, including django-rq, as well as usage with Heroku, Sentry, Supervisor, and systemd. RQ serializes jobs with pickle by default, which the project warns is safe only with trusted Redis instances; JSON is an alternative. Workers need a system that supports `fork()`, so Windows requires Windows Subsystem for Linux and a bash shell. Workers must also be able to import job functions, and producers and workers must share source code.