Gearman vs Starling: What are the differences?

What is Gearman? A generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes. 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.

What is Starling? A light weight server for reliable distributed message passing. Starling is a powerful but simple messaging server that enables reliable distributed queuing with an absolutely minimal overhead. It speaks the MemCache protocol for maximum cross-platform compatibility. Any language that speaks MemCache can take advantage of Starling's queue facilities.

Gearman and Starling belong to "Message Queue" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Gearman are:

• Open Source It’s free! (in both meanings of the word) Gearman has an active open source community that is easy to get involved with if you need help or want to contribute. Worried about licensing? Gearman is BSD
• Multi-language - There are interfaces for a number of languages, and this list is growing. You also have the option to write heterogeneous applications with clients submitting work in one language and workers performing that work in another
• Flexible - You are not tied to any specific design pattern. You can quickly put together distributed applications using any model you choose, one of those options being Map/Reduce

On the other hand, Starling provides the following key features:

• Written by Blaine Cook at Twitter
• Starling is a Message Queue Server based on MemCached
• Written in Ruby

Starling is an open source tool with 468 GitHub stars and 63 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Starling's open source repository on GitHub.