Starling vs EMQ: What are the differences?

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.

What is EMQ? The Scalable MQTT Broker for IoT and Mobile Applications. It is fully open source and licensed under the Apache Version 2.0. It implements both MQTT V3.1 and V3.1.1 protocol specifications, and supports MQTT-SN, CoAP, WebSocket, STOMP and SockJS at the same time.

Starling and EMQ can be primarily classified as "Message Queue" tools.

Some of the features offered by Starling are:

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

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

• Full MQTT V3.1/3.1.1 Protocol Specifications Support
• Easy to Install - Quick Install on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac and Windows
• Massively scalable - Scaling to 1 million connections on a single server

Starling and EMQ are both open source tools. It seems that Starling with 467 GitHub stars and 64 forks on GitHub has more adoption than EMQ with 181 GitHub stars and 96 GitHub forks.