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. Databases
  4. Databases
  5. RethinkDB vs ZeroMQ

RethinkDB vs ZeroMQ

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

RethinkDB
RethinkDB
Stacks292
Followers406
Votes307
GitHub Stars27.0K
Forks1.9K
ZeroMQ
ZeroMQ
Stacks258
Followers586
Votes71
GitHub Stars10.6K
Forks2.5K

RethinkDB vs ZeroMQ: What are the differences?

What is RethinkDB? JSON. Scales to multiple machines with very little effort. Open source. RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

What is ZeroMQ? 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.

RethinkDB belongs to "Databases" category of the tech stack, while ZeroMQ can be primarily classified under "Message Queue".

Some of the features offered by RethinkDB are:

  • JSON data model and immediate consistency.
  • Distributed joins, subqueries, aggregation, atomic updates.
  • Secondary, compound, and arbitrarily computed indexes.

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.

"Powerful query language" is the top reason why over 46 developers like RethinkDB, while over 17 developers mention "Fast" as the leading cause for choosing ZeroMQ.

RethinkDB and ZeroMQ are both open source tools. It seems that RethinkDB with 22.3K GitHub stars and 1.73K forks on GitHub has more adoption than ZeroMQ with 5.28K GitHub stars and 1.56K GitHub forks.

miDrive, Runbook, and The Control Group are some of the popular companies that use RethinkDB, whereas ZeroMQ is used by SocialDecode, Binary.com, and Pixotale. RethinkDB has a broader approval, being mentioned in 37 company stacks & 25 developers stacks; compared to ZeroMQ, which is listed in 35 company stacks and 12 developer stacks.

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

Advice on RethinkDB, ZeroMQ

Meili
Meili

Software engineer at Digital Science

Sep 24, 2020

Needs adviceonZeroMQZeroMQRabbitMQRabbitMQAmazon SQSAmazon SQS

Hi, we are in a ZMQ set up in a push/pull pattern, and we currently start to have more traffic and cases that the service is unavailable or stuck. We want to:

  • Not loose messages in services outages
  • Safely restart service without losing messages (@{ZeroMQ}|tool:1064| seems to need to close the socket in the receiver before restart manually)

Do you have experience with this setup with ZeroMQ? Would you suggest RabbitMQ or Amazon SQS (we are in AWS setup) instead? Something else?

Thank you for your time

500k views500k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

RethinkDB
RethinkDB
ZeroMQ
ZeroMQ

RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

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.

JSON data model and immediate consistency.;Distributed joins, subqueries, aggregation, atomic updates.;Secondary, compound, and arbitrarily computed indexes.;Hadoop-style map/reduce.;Friendly web and command-line administration tools.;Takes care of machine failures and network interrupts.;Multi-datacenter replication and failover.;Sharding and replication to multiple nodes.;Queries are automatically parallelized and distributed.;Lock-free operation via MVCC concurrency.
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.;High-speed asynchronous I/O engines, in a tiny library.;Backed by a large and active open source community.;Supports every modern language and platform.;Build any architecture: centralized, distributed, small, or large.;Free software with full commercial support.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
27.0K
GitHub Stars
10.6K
GitHub Forks
1.9K
GitHub Forks
2.5K
Stacks
292
Stacks
258
Followers
406
Followers
586
Votes
307
Votes
71
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 48
    Powerful query language
  • 46
    Excellent dashboard
  • 42
    JSON
  • 41
    Distributed database
  • 38
    Open source
Pros
  • 23
    Fast
  • 20
    Lightweight
  • 11
    Transport agnostic
  • 7
    No broker required
  • 4
    Low level APIs are in C
Cons
  • 5
    No message durability
  • 3
    Not a very reliable system - message delivery wise
  • 1
    M x N problem with M producers and N consumers
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to RethinkDB, ZeroMQ?

MongoDB

MongoDB

MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.

MySQL

MySQL

The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.

Kafka

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

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

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft® SQL Server is a database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions.

SQLite

SQLite

SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.

Cassandra

Cassandra

Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

Memcached

Memcached

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

MariaDB

MariaDB

Started by core members of the original MySQL team, MariaDB actively works with outside developers to deliver the most featureful, stable, and sanely licensed open SQL server in the industry. MariaDB is designed as a drop-in replacement of MySQL(R) with more features, new storage engines, fewer bugs, and better performance.

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