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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

Advice on NATS and NSQ
Pramod Nikam
Co Founder at Usability Designs · | 2 upvotes · 511.9K views
Needs advice
on
Apache ThriftApache ThriftKafkaKafka
and
NSQNSQ

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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Replies (1)
Naresh Kancharla
Staff Engineer at Nutanix · | 4 upvotes · 509.3K views
Recommends
on
KafkaKafka

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.

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Pros of NATS
Pros of NSQ
  • 22
    Fastest pub-sub system out there
  • 16
    Rock solid
  • 12
    Easy to grasp
  • 4
    Light-weight
  • 4
    Easy, Fast, Secure
  • 2
    Robust Security Model
  • 29
    It's in golang
  • 20
    Lightweight
  • 19
    Distributed
  • 18
    Easy setup
  • 16
    High throughput
  • 10
    Publish-Subscribe
  • 7
    Save data if no subscribers are found
  • 7
    Scalable
  • 6
    Open source
  • 5
    Temporarily kept on disk
  • 2
    Simple-to use
  • 1
    Load balanced
  • 1
    Free
  • 1
    Primarily in-memory
  • 1
    Topics and channels concept

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Cons of NATS
Cons of NSQ
  • 2
    Persistence with Jetstream supported
  • 1
    No Order
  • 1
    No Persistence
  • 1
    Long term persistence
  • 1
    Get NSQ behavior out of Kafka but not inverse
  • 1
    HA

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What is NATS?

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.

What is NSQ?

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.

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What companies use NATS?
What companies use NSQ?
See which teams inside your own company are using NATS or NSQ.
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What tools integrate with NATS?
What tools integrate with NSQ?
What are some alternatives to NATS and NSQ?
Kafka
Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.
gRPC
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...
MQTT
It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium.
RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.
Mosquitto
It is lightweight and is suitable for use on all devices from low power single board computers to full servers.. The MQTT protocol provides a lightweight method of carrying out messaging using a publish/subscribe model. This makes it suitable for Internet of Things messaging such as with low power sensors or mobile devices such as phones, embedded computers or microcontrollers.
See all alternatives