What is Nchan?
It is built as a module for the Nginx web server. It can be configured as a standalone server, or as a shim between your application and hundreds, thousands, or millions of live subscribers. It can buffer messages in memory, on-disk, or via Redis.
Nchan is a tool in the Realtime Backend / API category of a tech stack.
Nchan is an open source tool with 3K GitHub stars and 292 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Nchan's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Nchan?
Companies
6 companies reportedly use Nchan in their tech stacks, including Chilli, checkmk, and stack.
Developers
34 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Nchan.
Nchan's Features
- flexible pub/sub server
- Horizontally scalable (using Redis)
- Subscribe to hundreds of channels over a single subscriber connection.
Nchan Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Nchan?
Pushpin
Pushpin is a reverse proxy server that makes it easy to build realtime web services. The project is unique among realtime push solutions in that it is designed to address the needs of API creators.
NATS
Unlike traditional enterprise messaging systems, NATS has an always-on dial tone that does whatever it takes to remain available. This forms a great base for building modern, reliable, and scalable cloud and distributed systems.
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
Apache HTTP Server
The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.
Amazon EC2
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
