With the ability to run background tasks using workers, you might naturally be confused if Channels can replace Celery. There are primarily two major differences: message delivery guarantees and task statuses.

Channels, currently implemented with a Redis backend, provide an at best one-off guarantee, while Celery provides an at least one-off guarantee. This essentially means that Celery will retry when a delivery fails until it receives a successful acknowledgment. In the case of Channels, it is pretty much fire-and-forget.

Secondly, Channels does not provide information on the status of a task out of the box. We need to build such functionality ourselves, for instance by updating the database. Celery tasks status can be queried and persisted.

To sum up, you can use Channels instead of Celery for some less critical use cases. However, for a more robust and proven solution, you should rely on Celery.