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  1. Stackups
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  4. Message Queue
  5. MQTT vs NSQ

MQTT vs NSQ

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

NSQ
NSQ
Stacks141
Followers356
Votes148
MQTT
MQTT
Stacks635
Followers577
Votes7

MQTT vs NSQ: What are the differences?

  1. Message Delivery: MQTT follows a publish-subscribe model where messages are pushed to clients, ensuring that all clients receive the messages. On the other hand, NSQ uses a distributed message queue system where messages are pulled by consumers, allowing for more control over message consumption.
  2. Scalability: MQTT is known for its lightweight protocol, making it suitable for low-power devices and IoT applications. In contrast, NSQ is designed for horizontal scalability, allowing it to handle large volumes of messages across multiple nodes efficiently.
  3. Persistence: MQTT has limited support for message persistence, relying on QoS levels to ensure message delivery. NSQ, in contrast, provides built-in support for message persistence, allowing messages to be stored until they are consumed.
  4. Error Handling: MQTT provides more comprehensive error handling mechanisms, such as acknowledgment messages and quality of service levels, to ensure message delivery and reliability. NSQ, while robust, may require manual intervention for error handling and monitoring.
  5. Community Support: MQTT has a larger and more established community, with a wide range of client libraries and tools available for integration and development. NSQ, while growing in popularity, may have a more limited selection of community-contributed resources.
  6. Development Focus: MQTT is primarily focused on lightweight communication for IoT and M2M applications, emphasizing low latency and minimal overhead. NSQ, on the other hand, is designed for high-performance message processing and distributed systems, prioritizing scalability and fault tolerance.

In Summary, MQTT and NSQ differ in message delivery mechanisms, scalability, persistence, error handling, community support, and development focus.

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Advice on NSQ, MQTT

Pramod
Pramod

Co Founder at Usability Designs

Mar 2, 2020

Needs advice

I am looking into IoT World Solution where we have MQTT Broker. This MQTT Broker Sits in one of the Data Center. We are doing a lot of Alert and Alarm related processing on that Data, Currently, we are looking into Solution which can do distributed persistence of log/alert primarily on remote Disk.

Our primary need is to use lightweight where operational complexity and maintenance costs can be significantly reduced. We want to do it on-premise so we are not considering cloud solutions.

We looked into the following alternatives:

Apache Kafka - Great choice but operation and maintenance wise very complex. Rabbit MQ - High availability is the issue, Apache Pulsar - Operational Complexity. NATS - Absence of persistence. Akka Streams - Big learning curve and operational streams.

So we are looking into a lightweight library that can do distributed persistence preferably with publisher and subscriber model. Preferable on JVM stack.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

NSQ
NSQ
MQTT
MQTT

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium.

support distributed topologies with no SPOF;horizontally scalable (no brokers, seamlessly add more nodes to the cluster);low-latency push based message delivery (performance);combination load-balanced and multicast style message routing;excel at both streaming (high-throughput) and job oriented (low-throughput) workloads;primarily in-memory (beyond a high-water mark messages are transparently kept on disk);runtime discovery service for consumers to find producers (nsqlookupd);transport layer security (TLS);data format agnostic;few dependencies (easy to deploy) and a sane, bounded, default configuration;simple TCP protocol supporting client libraries in any language;HTTP interface for stats, admin actions, and producers (no client library needed to publish);integrates with statsd for realtime instrumentation;robust cluster administration interface (nsqadmin)
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Statistics
Stacks
141
Stacks
635
Followers
356
Followers
577
Votes
148
Votes
7
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 29
    It's in golang
  • 20
    Distributed
  • 20
    Lightweight
  • 18
    Easy setup
  • 17
    High throughput
Cons
  • 1
    Long term persistence
  • 1
    Get NSQ behavior out of Kafka but not inverse
  • 1
    HA
Pros
  • 3
    Varying levels of Quality of Service to fit a range of
  • 2
    Very easy to configure and use with open source tools
  • 2
    Lightweight with a relatively small data footprint
Cons
  • 1
    Easy to configure in an unsecure manner

What are some alternatives to NSQ, MQTT?

Kafka

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Celery

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

ActiveMQ

ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ

The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.

Apache NiFi

Apache NiFi

An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic.

Gearman

Gearman

Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events.

Memphis

Memphis

Highly scalable and effortless data streaming platform. Made to enable developers and data teams to collaborate and build real-time and streaming apps fast.

IronMQ

IronMQ

An easy-to-use highly available message queuing service. Built for distributed cloud applications with critical messaging needs. Provides on-demand message queuing with advanced features and cloud-optimized performance.

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