How kiln compares

kiln takes its model from Hangfire. In Go, the libraries people usually weigh it against are River and Asynq, both mature and with larger communities. This table only compares features, as each project documented them in October 2026:

	kiln	Hangfire	River	Asynq
Storage	PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite	SQL Server; Redis with Pro; others from the community	PostgreSQL; SQLite (experimental)	Redis
License	MIT	LGPL-3.0, paid Pro and Ace	MPL-2.0, paid Pro	MIT
Retries with backoff	yes	yes	yes	yes
Job waits for other jobs	yes	yes, several parents with Pro	Pro (workflows)	no
Batches with a continuation	yes	Pro	Pro, as a workflow	no
Concurrency limit per key	yes	a mutex; Ace for more	Pro	in the handler, with x/rate
Rate limit per key	yes	Ace	no	no
Unique jobs	yes	third party	yes	yes
Cron with time zones	yes, with a misfire policy	yes	yes; durable schedule with Pro	yes
Transactional enqueue	yes	yes	yes	no
Cancel a running job	yes	yes	yes	yes, best effort
Pause a queue	yes	third party	yes	yes
Dashboard	in the module	in the package	separate app (River UI)	separate app (Asynqmon)
OpenTelemetry	kilnotel	contrib package	rivercontrib	Prometheus metrics

Moving a Hangfire application over? Coming from Hangfire maps its calls and attributes to kiln's, one by one.