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Do you mean a cronjob that calls a Django manager command to do the work? Or invokes an API method? From my experience cronjobs have a lot of downsides as well. They're great for doing tasks local to the server the job is running on. Not so great for the kinds of tasks (periodic or transactional) that Celery/a real queue is designed for.

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Crons are fine for running Django commands that are just talking to the same services as your web views (databases, cache, email services etc). It should be fine to let them run in their dedicated VM/containers, using Ansible etc to keep the crontab configurations in the repo.

Celerybeat has the advantage of better visibility e.g. you can configure them in the Django admin and check when they are running. If you are not using Celery though and your needs are simple, it's easier to just use plain crons.

I use them for invoking django commands on the same server. I do use celery for transactional jobs though. It’s only periodic jobs that get called with cron. For the context, I do this on small web apps with less than 20 dedicated servers (real servers not VPS), so there is a “manager” server that does nothing but run periodic tasks, management interventions, and cleanup operations.

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