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NATS vs NSQ: What are the differences?
Developers describe NATS 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. On the other hand, NSQ is detailed as "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.
NATS belongs to "Realtime Backend / API" category of the tech stack, while NSQ can be primarily classified under "Message Queue".
"Fastest pub-sub system out there" is the top reason why over 13 developers like NATS, while over 23 developers mention "It's in golang" as the leading cause for choosing NSQ.
NSQ is an open source tool with 15.6K GitHub stars and 2.03K GitHub forks. Here's a link to NSQ's open source repository on GitHub.
Apcera, Workiva, and Bridgevine are some of the popular companies that use NATS, whereas NSQ is used by Stripe, Docker, and Segment. NATS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 26 company stacks & 12 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 NATS
- Fastest pub-sub system out there22
- Rock solid16
- Easy to grasp11
- Light-weight4
- Easy, Fast, Secure4
- Robust Security Model2
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 NATS
- Persistence with Jetstream supported2
- No Order1
- No Persistence1
Cons of NSQ
- Get NSQ behavior out of Kafka but not inverse1
- Long term persistence1
- HA1
