JobRunr compared
Find out how JobRunr compares to some alternatives
Below you can find an external audit where JobRunr is compared to some alternatives.
This report was created on June 19, 2020 and updated on November 07, 2025.
Solving the Real-World Pains
A feature matrix is useful, but developers choose tools to solve specific, frustrating problems. Here’s how JobRunr compares to traditional schedulers like Quartz on the pains that matter.
| The Pain Point | Traditional Schedulers (e.g., Quartz, In-house built solution, …) | The JobRunr Way (Modern & Simple) |
|---|---|---|
| When jobs fail, it’s a black box. | No built-in dashboard. Requires custom-built monitoring, logging, and UI just to see what’s happening. | A built-in dashboard from the first minute. You can see, monitor, and retry failed jobs with zero extra code. |
| My scheduler is complex and fragile. | Heavy setup. Requires manual implementation for retries and manual configuration of thread pools. Jobs are complex classes. | Lightweight and simple by design. Retries are built-in. Worker threads are managed automatically. |
| I just want to ship features faster. | Requires significant boilerplate. You must implement a Job interface, build JobDetail, and configure a Trigger. | A single line of code. Just use a Java 8 lambda to schedule a job in one line. This means less code, faster development, and easier maintenance. |
Feature Matrix
The following tables provides an overview of each approach’s features.
Project characteristics
| Project characteristics | JobRunr | Quartz | Native JEE (Timer, ExecutorService) | Spring (scheduling support) | db-scheduler |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Licence | LGPL v3 | Apache v2.0 | GNU GPL v2 | Apache v2.0 | Apache v2.0 |
| Cost | Free | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Project health | Actively maintained since April 2020, 49 contributors, 120 releases | Actively maintained, on GitHub since 2010, 65 contributors, 26 releases | Since Java 5 | Actively maintained since 2002, 1k+ contributors, over 200 releases | Actively maintained since September 2015, 69 contributors, 72 releases |
| Support channels | GitHub Discussions and pro tier | Google groups (forum, mailing list) | N/A | Public community and pro tier | GitHub |
| Documentation | Online documentation | Online documentation | None dedicated (numerous guides) | Online documentation | GitHub README |
| Participates in OpenJDK Quality Outreach Program | Yes | No | N/A | Yes | No |
| Developer friendliness | 5/5 | 2/5 | 3/5 | 3/5 | 3/5 |
Core features
| Core features | JobRunr | Quartz | Native JEE (Timer, ExecutorService) | Spring (scheduling support) | db-scheduler |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Support for definition of job types | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Custom Trigger support | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes (Tasks.custom) |
| Cron support | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Asynchronous jobs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Delayed jobs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Recurring (scheduled) jobs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent jobs | Yes | Yes | No | Yes (with Quartz) | Yes |
| Management of existing jobs | Yes | Yes | No | Yes (with Quartz) | Yes |
Advanced features
| Advanced features | JobRunr | Quartz | Native JEE (Timer, ExecutorService) | Spring (scheduling support) | db-scheduler |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Distributed processing | Yes, out-of-the-box | Yes | No | Yes (with Quartz) | Yes |
| Transactional scheduling | Yes | Yes | No | Yes (with Quartz) | Yes |
| Job execution thread pool | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cluster safe (i.e. single job execution) | Yes, (optimistic locking) | Yes, (row locks) | No | Yes (Quartz or Shedlock) | Yes, (optimistic locking) |
| Multiple job stores (e.g. in-memory and DB) | Yes | Yes | No | Yes (with Quartz) | No |
| Job listeners (notifications on jobs triggers) | Yes | Yes | No | Yes (with Quartz) | No |
| Decoupled scheduling and processing | Yes | Yes (?) | No | Yes (with Quartz) (?) | Yes |
| Storage support | JDBC, RAM, MongoDB, Amazon Document DB | JDBC, Ram, Terracotta | NA | Multiple (Quartz or Shedlock) | JDBC |
| Carbon-Aware Job Processing | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| High-Throughput Queue (SmartQueue) | Yes (Pro) | No | No | No | No |
| Built-in K8S Autoscaling Metrics | Yes (Pro) | No | No | No | No |
Bonus features
| Bonus features | JobRunr | Quartz | Native JEE (Timer, ExecutorService) | Spring (scheduling support) | db-scheduler |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Web dashboard | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Easy scheduling using lambdas | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
| Multi-Cluster Monitoring Dashboard | Yes (Pro) | No | No | No | No |
JobRunr gets a 5/5 score for developer friendliness as it:
- comes out-of-the-box with a web dashboard to present past, present and future jobs, along with execution statistics and management controls
- has great Spring Boot, Micronaut and Quarkus integration
- auto generates all SQL Tables / NoSQL data structures on first launch
- allows to start and schedule jobs in a 1-liner using nothing more than a Java 8 lambda