# Job queues

> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.temporal.io/llms.txt).
> Any documentation page is available as raw Markdown by appending `.md` to its URL.

> Run background jobs as Standalone Activities with durable retries, timeouts, priority and fairness dispatch, and per-job visibility without a Workflow.

A job is a single, discrete unit of work that runs asynchronously in the background such as sending an email, processing a webhook, syncing data, or executing a single function reliably.

A job queue is the system that manages these jobs: accepting work, dispatching it to workers, retrying on failure, and providing visibility into what's running and what failed.

**[Standalone Activities](/standalone-activity) are Temporal's job queue.**

They let you use Temporal Activities as background jobs, in addition to using the same Activities as steps inside a Workflow. You write an Activity once and can run it either as a background job or as part of a multi-step Workflow.

Under the hood, Standalone Activities use Temporal's [Task Queues](/task-queue) for dispatching work to Workers.

## What you get that a queue library doesn't give you

Each job is a durably persisted [Activity Execution](/activity-execution), not a message in a broker you also have to run.

That changes four things a job queue usually leaves to you:

- **Delivery semantics you choose.** At-least-once by default, with a [Retry Policy](/encyclopedia/retry-policies), timeouts, and exponential backoff enforced by the Temporal Service. Set retry maximum attempts to 1 for at-most-once.
- **Addressable jobs.** Every job has an Activity Id and Run Id. Use them to fetch the result, cancel, or terminate a specific job, rather than searching a log for it.
- **Deduplication at submit time.** A conflict policy and a reuse policy decide what happens when a job with the same Id is already running or has already run, so a retried submit doesn't create a second job.
- **Dispatch under load.** Jobs carry priority and fairness weights, and a slow job doesn't block dispatch of the ones behind it.

For queries, `temporal activity list` and [List Filters](/list-filter) search Executions by type, status, and Task Queue, and standard [Activity metrics](/cloud/metrics/openmetrics/metrics-reference#activity-metrics) cover scheduled, started, completed, failed, timed out, and canceled counts.

## When to use a Standalone Activity instead of a Workflow

Use a Standalone Activity to run **one** Activity. Use a [Workflow](/workflows) to orchestrate **several**, or to hold state between steps.

Running a single Activity as a Standalone Activity rather than wrapping it in a Workflow costs fewer [Billable Actions](/cloud/actions-usage#actions-in-workflows) on Temporal Cloud, and for short jobs it's lower latency, because there are fewer Worker round-trips.

You don't have to decide up front. The same Activity Function runs both ways with no code changes, so a job that later becomes one step of a longer process moves into a Workflow without a rewrite.

## What you still operate

Temporal doesn't replace your compute. You run and scale the Workers that poll [Task Queues](/task-queue) and execute the Activities; the Temporal Service handles persistence, dispatch, retries, and timeouts.

Long jobs also stay your responsibility to instrument: heartbeats are optional, and without them a job that dies mid-run isn't detected until its Start-To-Close Timeout expires.

## Public Preview limitations

Standalone Activities are in [Public Preview](/evaluate/product-release-stages#public-preview), which affects what you can do to a job in flight:

- Pause, unpause, reset, and update are not supported yet. Cancel and terminate are.
- The `TerminateExisting` conflict policy and `TerminateIfRunning` reuse policy are not supported yet.

## Resources

Read about [Standalone Activity concepts, features, and limitations](/standalone-activity), or jump to a language-specific quickstart:

- [.NET SDK](/develop/dotnet/activities/standalone-activities-quickstart): Start and manage a Standalone Activity Execution in C# and .NET, with a runnable code sample.
- [Go SDK](/develop/go/activities/standalone-activities-quickstart): Start and manage a Standalone Activity Execution in Go, with a runnable code sample.
- [Java SDK](/develop/java/activities/standalone-activities-quickstart): Start and manage a Standalone Activity Execution in Java and other JVM languages, with a runnable code sample.
- [Python SDK](/develop/python/activities/standalone-activities-quickstart): Start and manage a Standalone Activity Execution in Python, with a runnable code sample.
- [Ruby SDK](/develop/ruby/activities/standalone-activities-quickstart): Start and manage a Standalone Activity Execution in Ruby, with a runnable code sample.
- [TypeScript SDK](/develop/typescript/activities/standalone-activities-quickstart): Start and manage a Standalone Activity Execution in TypeScript, with a runnable code sample.