Though I don't have direct experience with this particular one, I can tell you it's similarly implemented to Resque (the ruby async library). In my experience, Resque has been wicked fast thanks to Redis' excellent in-memory database. From my personal use cases, Redis has been pretty fast on both python and ruby.

It really depends on what you are trying to do really. If you don't want additional moving parts and have Redis installed, I suppose this will do the job fine.

The development version of Celery also supports Redis as a queue: http://ask.github.com/celery/tutorials/otherqueues.html

It doesn't really compare. HotQueue is just a queue. Celery is full-blown task queue (with periodic tasks, task retries, monitoring, etc) that supports multiple backends (AMPQ, Redis, SQL databases) and even integrates nicely with existing python web frameworks (Django, Flask).

I'm using Celery with the Redis backend for http://lanyrd.com/