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.