Really cool to see a batteries‑included option in Django for background jobs.

For folks who’ve used Celery/Procrastinate/Chancy: how does retry/ACK behavior feel in real projects? Any rough edges?

What about observability — dashboards, tracing, metrics — good enough out of the box, or did you bolt on extra stuff?

Also, any gotchas with type hints or decorator-style tasks when refactoring? I’ve seen those bite before.

And lastly, does swapping backends for tests actually feel seamless, or is that more of a “works in the demo” thing?

(I'm biased, I'm the author of Chancy)

One of the major complaints with Celery is observability. Databased-backed options like Procastinate and Chancy will never reach the potential peak throughput of Celery+RabbitMQ, but they're still sufficient to run millions upon millions of tasks per day even on a $14/month VPS. The tradeoff to this is excellent insight into what's going on - all state lives in the database, you can just query it. Both Procastinate and Chancy come with Django integrations, so you can even query it with the ORM.

For Chancy in particular, retries are a (very trivial) plugin (that's enabled by default) - https://github.com/TkTech/chancy/blob/main/chancy/plugins/re.... You can swap it out and add whatever complex retry strategies you'd like.

Chancy also comes with a "good enough" metrics plugin and a dashboard. Not suitable for an incredibly busy instance with tens of thousands of distinct types of jobs, but good enough for most projects. You can see the new UI and some example screenshots in the upcoming 0.26 release - https://github.com/TkTech/chancy/pull/58 (and that dashboard is for a production app running ~600k jobs a day on what's practically a toaster). The dashboard can be run standalone locally and pointing to any database as-needed, run inside a worker process, or embedded inside any existing asgi app.