Gearman vs IronMQ: 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 IronMQ? Message Queue for any deployment. 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.

Gearman and IronMQ 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, IronMQ provides the following key features:

• Instant High Availability- Runs on top cloud infrastructures and uses multiple high-availability data centers. Uses reliable datastores for message durability and persistence.
• Easy to Use- IronMQ is super easy to use. Simply connect directly to the API endpoints and you're ready to create and use queues. There are also client libraries available in any language you want – Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, .NET, Go, Node.JS, and more
• Scalable / High Performance- Built using high-performance languages designed for concurrency and runs on industrial-strength clouds. Push messages and stream data at will without worrying about memory limits or adding more servers.

"Free" is the primary reason why developers consider Gearman over the competitors, whereas "Great Support" was stated as the key factor in picking IronMQ.

According to the StackShare community, Gearman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 19 company stacks & 5 developers stacks; compared to IronMQ, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.