Celery: Pricing, Features & Alternatives
Celery is an open-source (BSD) distributed task queue for Python, running asynchronous jobs and periodic tasks via a message broker such as RabbitMQ, Redis or Amazon SQS. It is widely used for background processing in Django and Flask apps.
Who it’s for: Python and Django teams who want a free task queue they run themselves on RabbitMQ or Redis.
Category
Background Jobs & Workflows
Pricing
Free tier available
Free tier
Yes
Best for
Background Jobs & Workflows — Python, Django, self-hosted
Celery at a Glance
- What it is
- Open-source distributed task queue
- Languages
- Python
- What it runs on
- Your RabbitMQ, Redis or Amazon SQS broker
- How you pay
- Free (BSD); you pay for your infrastructure
- Free access
- Full open-source project
Checked November 2026 against Introduction to Celery (Celery docs), Celery on GitHub.
Celery Pricing Plans (2026)
| Plan | Price |
|---|---|
| Open SourcePopular | $0 (self-hosted) |
Pricing summary: Free. Always confirm current pricing on the official site.
Key Celery Features
- Open source under the BSD-3-Clause license; current stable version 5.6
- RabbitMQ and Redis brokers are feature complete; Amazon SQS is also supported
- Result backends include Redis, SQLAlchemy, Django ORM and Memcached
- Periodic tasks with celery beat, including crontab expressions
- Canvas primitives for groups, chains and chunks of tasks
- Supports Python 3.8 to 3.13 and PyPy3.9+
Pros
- +Free and open-source
- +Mature and in production use for many years
- +Deep Django/Flask integration
- +Flexible broker support
Cons
- −Python only
- −You run the broker and workers
- −Configuration can be complex
Best Celery Alternatives
Compare allCelery Compared
Celery FAQ
What is Celery used for?⌄
Celery is a background jobs & workflows tool. The classic distributed task queue for Python — async jobs and scheduled tasks at scale.
Is Celery free?⌄
Yes — Celery has a free tier you can start with, and paid plans for more usage and features.
How much does Celery cost?⌄
Celery is free to use.
What are the best Celery alternatives?⌄
Popular Celery alternatives include Inngest, Sidekiq, Trigger.dev, BullMQ, Temporal. Compare pricing and features on our Celery alternatives page.
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