At Twio we picked pg-boss for our job queue, ran into trouble when we went serverless, looked at Pub/Sub, and ended up on Google Cloud Tasks. This is what each queue got right, what it got wrong for our workload, and the rule we landed on for choosing between them.
The workload
Twio is an AI SaaS for loan brokers. The piece that needs a job queue is email processing: download an email, parse the body and attachments, OCR, classify with an LLM, write structured data, and index for RAG. One email with five attachments easily becomes 30+ background jobs. A batch upload becomes hundreds.
Why pg-boss worked — until it didn't
Our database was Postgres on Neon, so pg-boss was the obvious starting point. No extra infrastructure, and one feature we genuinely loved: transactional enqueue. Because jobs live in the same database as business data, you can create a job in the same transaction as the row that triggered it. No dual-write problem, no "DB succeeded but the queue API failed" inconsistency.
