Gearman vs ZeroMQ

Gearman vs ZeroMQ: What are the differences?

Developers describe Gearman as "A generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes". Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events. 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.

Gearman and ZeroMQ can be categorized as "Message Queue" tools.

Some of the features offered by Gearman are:

• Open Source It’s free! (in both meanings of the word) Gearman has an active open source community that is easy to get involved with if you need help or want to contribute. Worried about licensing? Gearman is BSD
• Multi-language - There are interfaces for a number of languages, and this list is growing. You also have the option to write heterogeneous applications with clients submitting work in one language and workers performing that work in another
• Flexible - You are not tied to any specific design pattern. You can quickly put together distributed applications using any model you choose, one of those options being Map/Reduce

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.

"Free" is the top reason why over 10 developers like Gearman, while over 17 developers mention "Fast" as the leading cause for choosing ZeroMQ.

ZeroMQ is an open source tool with 5.33K GitHub stars and 1.57K GitHub forks. Here's a link to ZeroMQ's open source repository on GitHub.

Binary.com, GrowSumo, and Runbook are some of the popular companies that use ZeroMQ, whereas Gearman is used by Instagram, Hootsuite, and Grooveshark. ZeroMQ has a broader approval, being mentioned in 35 company stacks & 12 developers stacks; compared to Gearman, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.