NATS vs NSQ

Overview

NSQ

Stacks142

Followers356

Votes148

NATS

Stacks394

Followers498

Votes60

NATS vs NSQ: What are the differences?

Introduction

NATS and NSQ are both messaging systems that facilitate communication between microservices in a distributed architecture. While they serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between NATS and NSQ that make them suitable for different use cases.

Architecture: NATS follows a simple and lightweight publish-subscribe messaging pattern, with support for point-to-point and request-reply messaging. It uses a central message broker and provides high throughput and low latency communication. On the other hand, NSQ adopts a distributed message queue model, where messages are pushed to a topic and consumed by multiple subscribers in a fault-tolerant manner. It offers built-in message persistence and at-least-once delivery semantics.
Clustering: NATS uses a hierarchical hub-and-spoke clustering model, where multiple NATS servers connect to a central hub. This allows for federated messaging across clusters, providing scalability and fault tolerance. In contrast, NSQ supports fully decentralized clustering, where nodes can connect to each other directly. This enables NSQ to achieve higher scalability and fault tolerance compared to NATS.
Message Routing: NATS does not support message routing based on content or source address. Instead, it relies on subjects to route messages to interested subscribers. NSQ, on the other hand, allows for explicit message routing based on topic names. This makes it easier to implement complex routing logic and enables selective consumption of messages.
Monitoring and Management: NATS provides a built-in monitoring and management console called NATS Streaming Server, which offers real-time visibility into message traffic and cluster status. It also supports authentication, authorization, and TLS encryption. NSQ, on the other hand, does not have a built-in monitoring and management console. However, it provides a web-based admin interface for monitoring topics, channels, and message rates.
Ease of Use: NATS is designed to be simple and easy to use, with minimal configuration and a small footprint. It supports multiple client libraries and has extensive language bindings. NSQ, on the other hand, requires more configuration and setup to run a cluster. It has fewer client libraries compared to NATS, but provides support for integration with popular programming languages.
Community and Ecosystem: NATS has a larger and more mature community, with a wide range of integrations and third-party tools available. It has been widely adopted by companies and is actively maintained by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). NSQ has a smaller community compared to NATS, but still has an active user base. It provides a plugin system for extending functionality and supports integration with various monitoring and logging tools.

In summary, NATS and NSQ differ in their architecture, clustering approach, message routing capabilities, monitoring and management features, ease of use, and community support. These differences should be considered when choosing a messaging system for a specific use case.

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Advice on NSQ, NATS

Pramod

Co Founder at Usability Designs

Mar 2, 2020

Needs advice

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.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

NSQ	NATS
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.	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.
support distributed topologies with no SPOF;horizontally scalable (no brokers, seamlessly add more nodes to the cluster);low-latency push based message delivery (performance);combination load-balanced and multicast style message routing;excel at both streaming (high-throughput) and job oriented (low-throughput) workloads;primarily in-memory (beyond a high-water mark messages are transparently kept on disk);runtime discovery service for consumers to find producers (nsqlookupd);transport layer security (TLS);data format agnostic;few dependencies (easy to deploy) and a sane, bounded, default configuration;simple TCP protocol supporting client libraries in any language;HTTP interface for stats, admin actions, and producers (no client library needed to publish);integrates with statsd for realtime instrumentation;robust cluster administration interface (nsqadmin)	-
Statistics
Stacks 142	Stacks 394
Followers 356	Followers 498
Votes 148	Votes 60
Pros & Cons
Pros 29 It's in golang 20 Lightweight 20 Distributed 18 Easy setup 17 High throughput Cons 1 HA 1 Long term persistence 1 Get NSQ behavior out of Kafka but not inverse	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 Order 1 No Persistence

What are some alternatives to NSQ, NATS?

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

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

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

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

Amazon SQS

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

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 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.

Related Comparisons

NATS vs NSQ: What are the differences?

Introduction

Architecture: NATS follows a simple and lightweight publish-subscribe messaging pattern, with support for point-to-point and request-reply messaging. It uses a central message broker and provides high throughput and low latency communication. On the other hand, NSQ adopts a distributed message queue model, where messages are pushed to a topic and consumed by multiple subscribers in a fault-tolerant manner. It offers built-in message persistence and at-least-once delivery semantics.
Clustering: NATS uses a hierarchical hub-and-spoke clustering model, where multiple NATS servers connect to a central hub. This allows for federated messaging across clusters, providing scalability and fault tolerance. In contrast, NSQ supports fully decentralized clustering, where nodes can connect to each other directly. This enables NSQ to achieve higher scalability and fault tolerance compared to NATS.
Message Routing: NATS does not support message routing based on content or source address. Instead, it relies on subjects to route messages to interested subscribers. NSQ, on the other hand, allows for explicit message routing based on topic names. This makes it easier to implement complex routing logic and enables selective consumption of messages.
Monitoring and Management: NATS provides a built-in monitoring and management console called NATS Streaming Server, which offers real-time visibility into message traffic and cluster status. It also supports authentication, authorization, and TLS encryption. NSQ, on the other hand, does not have a built-in monitoring and management console. However, it provides a web-based admin interface for monitoring topics, channels, and message rates.
Ease of Use: NATS is designed to be simple and easy to use, with minimal configuration and a small footprint. It supports multiple client libraries and has extensive language bindings. NSQ, on the other hand, requires more configuration and setup to run a cluster. It has fewer client libraries compared to NATS, but provides support for integration with popular programming languages.
Community and Ecosystem: NATS has a larger and more mature community, with a wide range of integrations and third-party tools available. It has been widely adopted by companies and is actively maintained by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). NSQ has a smaller community compared to NATS, but still has an active user base. It provides a plugin system for extending functionality and supports integration with various monitoring and logging tools.

NATS vs NSQ

Overview