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gRPC vs NSQ: What are the differences?
gRPC: A high performance, open-source universal RPC framework. gRPC is a modern open source high performance RPC framework that can run in any environment. It can efficiently connect services in and across data centers with pluggable support for load balancing, tracing, health checking..; 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.
gRPC can be classified as a tool in the "Remote Procedure Call (RPC)" category, while NSQ is grouped under "Message Queue".
Some of the features offered by gRPC are:
- Simple service definition
- Works across languages and platforms
- Start quickly and scale
On the other hand, NSQ provides the following key features:
- support distributed topologies with no SPOF
- horizontally scalable (no brokers, seamlessly add more nodes to the cluster)
- low-latency push based message delivery (performance)
gRPC and NSQ are both open source tools. It seems that gRPC with 22K GitHub stars and 5.12K forks on GitHub has more adoption than NSQ with 15.6K GitHub stars and 2.03K GitHub forks.
Slack, 9GAG, and Policygenius are some of the popular companies that use gRPC, whereas NSQ is used by Stripe, Docker, and Segment. gRPC has a broader approval, being mentioned in 53 company stacks & 48 developers stacks; compared to NSQ, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.
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.

Kafka is best fit here. Below are the advantages with Kafka ACLs (Security), Schema (protobuf), Scale, Consumer driven and No single point of failure.
Operational complexity is manageable with open source monitoring tools.
Pros of gRPC
- Higth performance25
- The future of API14
- Easy setup12
- Polyglot4
- Contract-based4
Pros of NSQ
- It's in golang29
- Lightweight20
- Distributed19
- Easy setup18
- High throughput16
- Publish-Subscribe10
- Save data if no subscribers are found7
- Scalable7
- Open source6
- Temporarily kept on disk5
- Simple-to use2
- Load balanced1
- Free1
- Primarily in-memory1
- Topics and channels concept1
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Cons of gRPC
Cons of NSQ
- Get NSQ behavior out of Kafka but not inverse1
- Long term persistence1
- HA1