I suspect people jump to Celery when something much simpler would probably be enough. I've seen people use Celery with all the associated deployment and monitoring complexity when all they wanted to do was run a slow task without blocking a request.

You could simply use this: if all you need is to run a slow task and not block a request there's this: https://github.com/defrex/django-after-response

I've usually used the system crontab (sometimes via https://github.com/andybak/django-cron ).

If you really really need a proper task queue then Huey is much lighter than Celery: https://huey.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

If you do need something more than