Hi

Whether to use cron or a queue really depends on the nature of the task at hand. If you're sending an email to everyone whose account expires one month from today, you want to execute that once per day, and a cron job would be ideal for this.

Adding something to a queue is usually triggered at some point in the page request. For example, queue sending an email to the user, or queue rendering a thumbnail from their profile pic. These things take a "long time" from the perspective the request-response cycle, so are shoved into the background to speed up returning the page to the user.

One option to look at is the Dispatcher package for Laravel. Basically set up a cron job to run every minute, and based on the schedule you set in the artisan command (eg php artisan sendOneMonthExpNotice) it will executre it on whatever schedule you want. Saves setting up multiple cron jobs per project. Just one cron job, running every minute, and all your commands will be processed on their own schedule.

cron or at only schedule the running of a "task" (Command) .. tasks can be considered a single chunk of work, or multiple. Crons can run a Job (in a queue) ... Jobs know very little - $job and $data and should be able to operate on its own.

You can cron up Commands to run, or use the Dispatcher as above, but there isn't a real way to "fire" a Job that runs in a queue, cleanly, without a Command - that I know of