Comparing Quartz, cron4j and Obsidian Scheduler

We’ve all worked on projects that required us to do very basic tasks at periodic intervals. Perhaps we chose a basic ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor. If we’re already using Spring, maybe we tried their TaskExecutor/TaskScheduler support.

But once we encounter any number of situations such as an increased quantity of tasks, new interdependencies between tasks, unexpected problems in task execution or the like, we will likely start to consider a more extensive scheduling solution.

Our website has a fairly exhaustive feature comparison of the most commonly used Java schedulers, so we won’t go into that in this post, but we do encourage you to take a look.

Features aside, are there other criteria that should come into play? Factors such as development team responsiveness to feature requests and bug reports certainly can be critical for many organizations. If you head over to the Quartz Download page, you’ll see that they haven’t had a release in over a year, despite there being many active unresolved issues.Cron4j hasn’t had a release in over 2 years. While Spring has made some changes to the design of their TaskExecutor/TaskScheduler support in recent releases, their true priorities lie elsewhere as they have not really done much to expand the feature set.

Obsidian Scheduler on the other hand is actively maintained, actively supported (with free online support!) and responsive to our user community. In the past year, we’ve averaged a release per month delivering a blend of features, enhancements and fixes, proof that we’re a nimble and responsive organization. We encourage you to give Obsidian a try today!