StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Realtime Backend API
  5. Gun vs NATS

Gun vs NATS

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

NATS
NATS
Stacks393
Followers498
Votes60
Gun
Gun
Stacks49
Followers87
Votes0
GitHub Stars18.7K
Forks1.2K

Gun vs NATS: What are the differences?

Developers describe Gun as "Self-hosted Firebase". GUN is a realtime, decentralized, embedded, graph database engine. On the other hand, NATS is detailed as "Lightweight publish-subscribe & distributed queueing messaging system". Unlike traditional enterprise messaging systems, NATS has an always-on dial tone that does whatever it takes to remain available. This forms a great base for building modern, reliable, and scalable cloud and distributed systems.

Gun and NATS belong to "Realtime Backend / API" category of the tech stack.

Gun is an open source tool with 10.3K GitHub stars and 640 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Gun's open source repository on GitHub.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

NATS
NATS
Gun
Gun

Unlike traditional enterprise messaging systems, NATS has an always-on dial tone that does whatever it takes to remain available. This forms a great base for building modern, reliable, and scalable cloud and distributed systems.

GUN is a realtime, decentralized, embedded, graph database engine.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
18.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.2K
Stacks
393
Stacks
49
Followers
498
Followers
87
Votes
60
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 22
    Fastest pub-sub system out there
  • 16
    Rock solid
  • 12
    Easy to grasp
  • 4
    Easy, Fast, Secure
  • 4
    Light-weight
Cons
  • 2
    Persistence with Jetstream supported
  • 1
    No Persistence
  • 1
    No Order
Pros
  • 0
    Real time
  • 0
    Small size
  • 0
    Open source

What are some alternatives to NATS, Gun?

Firebase

Firebase

Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.

Socket.IO

Socket.IO

It enables real-time bidirectional event-based communication. It works on every platform, browser or device, focusing equally on reliability and speed.

PubNub

PubNub

PubNub makes it easy for you to add real-time capabilities to your apps, without worrying about the infrastructure. Build apps that allow your users to engage in real-time across mobile, browser, desktop and server.

Pusher

Pusher

Pusher is the category leader in delightful APIs for app developers building communication and collaboration features.

SignalR

SignalR

SignalR allows bi-directional communication between server and client. Servers can now push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR supports Web Sockets, and falls back to other compatible techniques for older browsers. SignalR includes APIs for connection management (for instance, connect and disconnect events), grouping connections, and authorization.

Ably

Ably

Ably offers WebSockets, stream resume, history, presence, and managed third-party integrations to make it simple to build, extend, and deliver digital realtime experiences at scale.

Syncano

Syncano

Syncano is a backend platform to build powerful real-time apps more efficiently. Integrate with any API, minimize boilerplate code and control your data - all from one place.

SocketCluster

SocketCluster

SocketCluster is a fast, highly scalable HTTP + realtime server engine which lets you build multi-process realtime servers that make use of all CPU cores on a machine/instance. It removes the limitations of having to run your Node.js server as a single thread and makes your backend resilient by automatically recovering from worker crashes and aggregating errors into a central log.

deepstream.io

deepstream.io

Scalable Server for Realtime Web Apps with JSON structures that can be read, manipulated and listened to, messages that can be sent to one or more subscribers, and request response workflows, between two clients or servers.

8base

8base

A cloud service designed to power enterprise-grade web and mobile applications that require support for large numbers of users, complex data and transactional requirements, comprehensive role-based security and a modern look-and-feel.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase