Protobuf vs Serde: What are the differences?

Developers describe Protobuf as "Google's data interchange format". Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. On the other hand, Serde is detailed as "Serialization framework for Rust". It is a framework for serializing and deserializing Rust data structures efficiently and generically The ecosystem consists of data structures that know how to serialize and deserialize themselves along with data formats that know how to serialize and deserialize other things. It provides the layer by which these two groups interact with each other, allowing any supported data structure to be serialized and deserialized using any supported data format..

Protobuf and Serde belong to "Serialization Frameworks" category of the tech stack.

Protobuf and Serde are both open source tools. Protobuf with 40.9K GitHub stars and 11.1K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Serde with 3.01K GitHub stars and 320 GitHub forks.