Flux is a functional query and scripting language for InfluxDB that provides more functionality than its predecessor, InfluxQL, allowing users to build data pipelines to query, analyze, transform, and act on their data. Flux offers advantages such as processing data server-side, which provides better performance over using a client library, and allows users to perform tasks without requiring a third-party application. It also enables users to manage and process their time series data with packages like the Math package for math applications, Geopackage for geotemporal data, SQL package to query and write data to and from SQL databases, HTTP package for making get and post requests, JSON package for working with and parsing json. In contrast, Python is a popular language that offers over 137,000 libraries for time series tasks like data preparation, cleaning, analysis, forecasting, classification, anomaly detection, but it's not the obvious choice when it comes to performing complex data processing, forecasting, or anomaly detection.