McRouter vs ZeroMQ: What are the differences?

Developers describe McRouter as "A memcached protocol router for scaling memcached deployments, by Facebook". Mcrouter is a memcached protocol router for scaling memcached deployments. It's a core component of cache infrastructure at Facebook and Instagram where mcrouter handles almost 5 billion requests per second at peak. On the other hand, ZeroMQ is detailed as "Fast, lightweight messaging library that allows you to design complex communication system without much effort". The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.

McRouter and ZeroMQ are primarily classified as "Memcached" and "Message Queue" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by McRouter are:

• Memcached ASCII protocol
• Connection pooling
• Multiple hashing schemes

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

• Connect your code in any language, on any platform.
• Carries messages across inproc, IPC, TCP, TPIC, multicast.
• Smart patterns like pub-sub, push-pull, and router-dealer.

McRouter and ZeroMQ are both open source tools. It seems that ZeroMQ with 5.28K GitHub stars and 1.56K forks on GitHub has more adoption than McRouter with 2.48K GitHub stars and 435 GitHub forks.