Equivalent of Celery in Node JS

Edit-1/2018

My recommendation is not to use Kue now, as it seems to be a stalled project, use Celery instead. It is very well supported and maintained by the community and supports large number of use cases.


Old Answer

Go for Kue, it's a wholistic solution that resembles Celery in Python word; it has the concepts of: producers/consumers, delayed tasks, task retrial, task TTL, ability to round-robin tasks across multiple consumers listening to the same queue, etc.

Probably Celery is more advanced with more features with more brokers to support and you can use celery-node if you like, but, in my opinion, I think no need to go for a hybrid solution that requires installation of python and node when you can only use only language that's sufficient in 90% of the cases (unless necessary of course).


Celery is basically a RabbitMQ client. There are producers (tasks), consumers (workers) and AMQP message broker which delivers messages between tasks and workers.

Knowing that will enable you to write your own celery in node.js.

enter image description here

node-celery here is a library that enables your node process to work both as a celery client (Producer/Publisher) and a celery worker (Consumer).

See https://abhishek-tiwari.com/post/amqp-rabbitmq-and-celery-a-visual-guide-for-dummies


Go for Kue, it's a wholistic solution that resembles Celery in Python word; it has the concepts of: producers/consumers, delayed tasks, task retrial, task TTL, ability to round-robin tasks across multiple consumers listening to the same queue, etc.

Kue, after so much time have passed, still has the same old core issues unsolved:

  • github.com/Automattic/kue/issues/514
  • github.com/Automattic/kue/issues/130
  • github.com/Automattic/kue/issues/53

If anyone reading this don't want to rewrite Kue, don't start with it. It's good for simple tasks. But if you want to deal with a lot of them, concurrent, or task chains (when one task creates another) - stop wasting your time.

I've wasted a month trying to debug Kue and still no success. The best choice was to change Kue for Pubs/sub Messaging queue on RabbitMQ and Rabbot (another RabbitMQ wrap up).

Personally, I haven't used Celery as much to put all in for it, but as I've been searching for Celery alternative and found how someone is advising for Kue just boiled my blood in veins.

If you want to send a delayed email (as in Kue example) you can go for whatever you'd like without worrying about errors. But if you want a reliable system task/message queue, don't even start with Kue. I'd personally go with 5. node-celery(node celery)


It is also worth mentioning https://github.com/OptimalBits/bull. It is a fast, reliable, Redis-based queue written for stability and atomicity.

Bull 4 is currently in beta and has some nice features https://github.com/taskforcesh/bullmq