BullMQ UI: Why Bull Board May Not Be Enough (And How Upqueue.io Helps)

June 25, 2025

When your queue looks “quiet,” it might actually be failing silently

TL;DR

Bull Board is a solid starting point with basic job visibility.
Upqueue.io is built for production observability: alerts, metrics, child-job support, and UI polish make a difference.
Try it free—see the impact in under 10 minutes.

If you’re running BullMQ in production, you’ve likely got jobs, workers, and retries configured. But all the functionality in the world won’t help if you can’t see what’s actually happening.

That’s where a true BullMQ UI becomes essential.

A Good BullMQ UI Should Offer

✅ Live status (active, delayed, completed, failed)
✅ Job retry/delete controls
✅ Job context with JSON/logs
✅ Historical trends for queues
✅ Alerts for failures, stalled queues, memory/connection issues
✅ Visibility into child (nested) jobs

Let’s compare Bull Board — the go‑to starter UI — with Upqueue.io, which is built for observability-first production use.

🔍 Feature Comparison: Bull Board vs Upqueue.io

Feature	Bull Board	Upqueue.io
Queue/job state	✅ Real-time list	✅ + filter & search
Job retry/delete	✅ from UI	✅ from UI
Job logs/context	✅ limited JSON	✅ full JSON view + nested job tracing
Queue/job trends	❌ no charts	✅ per-queue graphs & backlog trends 📈
Failed job alerts	❌ no alerts	✅ Slack + Email notifications 🛎️
Stalled queue detection	❌ not available	✅ alerts and stats in dashboard
Memory/connection alerts	❌ not monitored	✅ Monitors Redis memory & connection health
Child jobs visibility	❌ unsupported	✅ Dedicated child‑jobs tab
Setup simplicity	✅ npm install	✅ zero‑config, just connect your Redis
Support & roadmap	Community-driven	✅ Active team, email support + feedback widget coming soon

🛠 Quick Setup Example

// queue.ts
import { Queue, Worker } from ‘bullmq’;

export const reportQueue = new Queue(‘report’, {
connection: { host: ‘localhost’, port: 6379 },
});

new Worker(‘report’, async job => {
return await generatePDF(job.data);
});

All good—but to run safely, you need a UI that shows when something breaks.

Upqueue.io connects to your Redis and instantly provides: