Commands vs Jobs in Laravel, which one to use?

For those who are starting out in Laravel, they often end up wondering which component to use for background activities, Commands or Jobs?
And you know what? I've also had this same doubt, although in theory they are very similar, in practice not so much. I'll start by explaining a little about the two separately and to finish I'll give a more concise comparison of both.

Commands:

• Main use: Commands are used to perform tasks in the terminal (CLI). They are typically custom commands that you define to be run manually via the command line.
• Example of use: Administrative tasks, such as cleaning the database, sending mass emails, or any other type of routine that you want to perform manually.
• Creation: Created with the php artisan make:command command. They are located in the app/Console/Commands folder.
• Execution: They are called directly in the terminal with the php artisan command <command_name>.

Jobs:

• Main usage: Jobs are specific tasks that you want to process in the background. They are often used in conjunction with queues.
• Example of use: Processing time-consuming data, such as resizing images, sending emails, or notifications that do not need to be immediate.
• Creation: Created with the php artisan make:job command. They are in the app/Jobs folder.
• Execution: They are called from the application code and can be stacked in a queue to be processed asynchronously.

Final comparison:

Essentially, Commands are used for administrative or interactive tasks, while Jobs are ideal for background processing and asynchronous jobs.

I hope you enjoy this short but extremely important summary regarding these two super important components in the ecosystem not only of the Laravel framework, but also of the web in general. In this short post, I focused only on showing in which real situations both will be used and not the functionality within the service itself, which can be a separate subject for each of them in the next posts (as there is a lot of content?).

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