Until Laravel 5.2 you had :listen and :work.
Work would process the first job in the queue.
Listen would process all jobs as they came through.
In Laravel 5.3+ this is no longer the case. Listen still exists, but it is deprecated and slated for removal in 5.5. You should prefer :work now.
Work now process jobs one after the other, but have a plethora of options you can configure.
Edit
The above was true at the time of the posting, but since then things have been changed a bit.
queue:work should be preferred when you want your queue’s to run as a daemon. This would be a long-lived process that would be beneficial where performance was an issue. This will use a cached version of the application and does not re-bootstrap the application every time a job is processed.
queue:listen should be used when you don’t care about performance or you don’t want to have to restart the queue after making changes to the code.
- They’ll both pop jobs off the queue 1-by-1 as received.
- They both share almost the exact same options that can be passed to them.