How it compares

Huey is the closest relative and worth a look: it also runs on SQLite with no dependencies, and has cron, retries and a django.tasks backend. tinyjobs adds three things. async def tasks run natively on the worker's loop, where Huey has no asyncio pipeline for running tasks, only helpers to await their results. FastAPI and Starlette can run the worker inside the server's lifespan. And cron fires from every worker without a leader, with timezones and misfire policies, on SQLite, Postgres or Redis. LiteQ, at 0.2, makes much the same pitch on SQLite.

RQ and arq need Redis. RQ's cron scheduler is still marked beta, and its retries take a fixed interval or a list of delays, with no built-in exponential backoff. arq is asyncio-only and in maintenance mode, with security fixes only. Celery and Dramatiq need a broker; Celery is still the answer for RabbitMQ routing, workflows and large fleets. Celery's rate_limit is per worker instance, so two workers double it, and a cap on how many of a task run at once needs a dedicated queue or a lock of your own; Dramatiq's rate limiters span workers, through a Redis or Memcached backend of their own, and are taken inside the task, which still claims the message. tinyjobs keeps concurrency= and rate= in the store it already has and applies them at the claim, so a job the limit stops waits in the queue instead of occupying a worker. RQ's depends_on and Celery's chains run one job after another on their brokers; tinyjobs' after= does it in the store, on SQLite and Postgres inside your own transaction, and stops there: no groups, no chords.

On Postgres, Procrastinate is the closest: async, with cron, retries, LISTEN/NOTIFY and jobs deferred inside your own transaction, but Postgres only. tinyjobs does the same on Postgres and on SQLite, and keeps Redis behind the same API. In Django, django-tasks-db keeps django.tasks tasks in your database through the ORM, so an enqueue can share your transaction, and django-q2 can use the ORM as its broker and has cron schedules.

As of October 2026, from each project's documentation.