sidequestjs/sidequest

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1011 stars · 23 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Sidequest is a Redis-free background job processor for Node.js that persists jobs in your existing PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB database. It offers distributed, durable job processing with retries, cron scheduling, job uniqueness, worker threads, and a built-in web dashboard, positioning itself as a BullMQ and pg-boss alternative.

Use cases

• run background jobs in node.js without redis
• schedule cron jobs from a node.js app
• process email sending jobs asynchronously
• replace bullmq with a database-backed queue
• monitor and debug job queues with a web dashboard
• run distributed workers across multiple nodes
• retry failed jobs with exponential backoff

When to choose

• you already run Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB and want to avoid provisioning Redis
• you need durable, distributed background processing in Node.js with atomic job claiming
• you want built-in cron scheduling, retries, job uniqueness, and a monitoring dashboard
• you want to inspect the queue with plain SQL against your own database

When to avoid

• your stack runs on Bun or Node.js below 22.6.0
• you need extremely high throughput where Redis-backed queues like BullMQ excel
• you need a battle-tested, years-proven solution for mission-critical workloads
• you require transactional enqueue tied to your database transactions (still on the roadmap)

Facets

library · maturity active

message-queue scheduling workflow-automation cli monitoring backend developer-tools databases web-development cli self-hosted job-queue background-jobs redis-free bullmq-alternative pg-boss-alternative worker-threads cron-scheduler dashboard typescript distributed automation nodejs docker

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