Cron Job Alternatives

The cluster discusses alternatives to traditional cron jobs for scheduling and running background tasks, frequently mentioning tools like Celery, task queues, and distributed schedulers, while debating their advantages over cron in terms of reliability and scalability.

📉 Falling 0.5x DevOps & Infrastructure
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Keywords

JIT cronhub.io OSS vercel.app DBOS OpenTelemetry CEO BusyBee uptimerobot.com example.com cron jobs job background queue tasks idle coroutines scheduler let users

Sample Comments

Grue3 • Apr 16, 2014 • View on HN

No, do it with Celery! It does everything cron can, but better.

batuhandirek • Sep 29, 2022 • View on HN

Love the irony that while the product is trying to "Make cron jobs a thing of the past", it probably runs with one polling the scheduled messages every second to send them JIT

davidecerri • Feb 26, 2013 • View on HN

finally an alternative to cron.

jedberg • Nov 6, 2025 • View on HN

As the CEO of DBOS I'm of course heavily biased, but I think DBOS is the perfect solution for you. It has everything you need (queues, crons, easy to understand pure Python). We'd be happy to help you through it if you get stuck. You can pop into the DBOS discord too (link on our webpage).

wsterling • Oct 8, 2015 • View on HN

I was really hoping for a Chronos like job scheduler for tasks.

timClicks • Feb 16, 2022 • View on HN

What's the state of the art in terms of "distributed cron" these days?

nesarkvechnep • Jan 24, 2023 • View on HN

Can this be more overengineered? Wouldn’t cron jobs do the job just fine?

woeirua • Jan 17, 2020 • View on HN

Yes, use a dedicated job server/process like Celery.

waxjar • Jul 2, 2015 • View on HN

A distributed cron job cluster. Interesting!

cjbprime • Aug 22, 2016 • View on HN

I haven't had this problem, but I would consider switching to a task queue like Celery. It'll be more robust/reliable than cron, too.