NSQ vs Apache Pulsar

Overview

NSQ

Stacks141

Followers356

Votes148

Apache Pulsar

Stacks118

Followers199

Votes24

NSQ vs Apache Pulsar: What are the differences?

What is NSQ? A realtime distributed messaging platform. 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.

What is Apache Pulsar? Distributed solution providing messaging and queuing for streaming data. Apache Pulsar is a distributed messaging solution developed and released to open source at Yahoo. Pulsar supports both pub-sub messaging and queuing in a platform designed for performance, scalability, and ease of development and operation.

NSQ and Apache Pulsar can be primarily classified as "Message Queue" tools.

Some of the features offered by NSQ are:

support distributed topologies with no SPOF
horizontally scalable (no brokers, seamlessly add more nodes to the cluster)
low-latency push based message delivery (performance)

On the other hand, Apache Pulsar provides the following key features:

Unified model supporting pub-sub messaging and queuing
Easy scalability to millions of topics
Native multi-datacenter replication

"It's in golang" is the primary reason why developers consider NSQ over the competitors, whereas "Simple" was stated as the key factor in picking Apache Pulsar.

NSQ and Apache Pulsar are both open source tools. It seems that NSQ with 18.1K GitHub stars and 2.39K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Apache Pulsar with 6.24K GitHub stars and 1.51K GitHub forks.

Stripe, Tokopedia, and Segment are some of the popular companies that use NSQ, whereas Apache Pulsar is used by MercadoLibre, Patients Know Best, and Zaihui. NSQ has a broader approval, being mentioned in 24 company stacks & 78 developers stacks; compared to Apache Pulsar, which is listed in 3 company stacks and 43 developer stacks.

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Advice on NSQ, Apache Pulsar

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	Apache Pulsar
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.	Apache Pulsar is a distributed messaging solution developed and released to open source at Yahoo. Pulsar supports both pub-sub messaging and queuing in a platform designed for performance, scalability, and ease of development and operation.
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)	Unified model supporting pub-sub messaging and queuing; Easy scalability to millions of topics; Native multi-datacenter replication; Multi-language client API; Guaranteed data durability; Scalable distributed storage leveraging Apache BookKeeper
Statistics
Stacks 141	Stacks 118
Followers 356	Followers 199
Votes 148	Votes 24
Pros & Cons
Pros 29 It's in golang 20 Lightweight 20 Distributed 18 Easy setup 17 High throughput Cons 1 Long term persistence 1 Get NSQ behavior out of Kafka but not inverse 1 HA	Pros 7 Simple 4 Scalable 3 High-throughput 2 Multi-tenancy 2 Geo-replication Cons 1 Only Supports Topics 1 Not jms compliant 1 No guaranteed dliefvery 1 No one and only one delivery 1 LImited Language support(6)

What are some alternatives to NSQ, Apache Pulsar?

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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.