Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Protobuf VS gRPC

Compare Protobuf VS gRPC and see what are their differences

Protobuf logo Protobuf

Protocol buffers are a language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.

gRPC logo gRPC

Application and Data, Languages & Frameworks, Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and Service Discovery
  • Protobuf Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29
  • gRPC Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-05-27

Protobuf videos

StreamBerry, part 2 : introduction to Google ProtoBuf

gRPC videos

gRPC, Protobufs and Go... OH MY! An introduction to building client/server systems with gRPC

More videos:

  • Review - gRPC with Mark Rendle
  • Review - GraphQL, gRPC or REST? Resolving the API Developer's Dilemma - Rob Crowley - NDC Oslo 2020
  • Review - Taking Full Advantage of gRPC
  • Review - gRPC Web: It’s All About Communication by Alex Borysov & Yevgen Golubenko
  • Review - tRPC, gRPC, GraphQL or REST: when to use what?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Protobuf and gRPC)
Configuration Management
100 100%
0% 0
Web Servers
0 0%
100% 100
Mobile Apps
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Protobuf and gRPC

Protobuf Reviews

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gRPC Reviews

SignalR Alternatives
SignalR is basically used to allow connection between client and server or vice-versa. It is a type of bi-directional communication between both the client and server. SignalR is compatible with web sockets and many other connections, which help in the direct push of content over the server. There are many alternatives for signalR that are used, like Firebase, pusher,...
Source: www.educba.com

Social recommendations and mentions

gRPC might be a bit more popular than Protobuf. We know about 88 links to it since March 2021 and only 82 links to Protobuf. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Protobuf mentions (82)

  • Developing games on and for Mac and Linux
    Protocol Buffers: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Adding Codable conformance to Union with Metaprogramming
    ProtocolBuffers’ OneOf message addresses the case of having a message with many fields where at most one field will be set at the same time. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Logcat is awful. What would you improve?
    That's definitely the bigger thing. I think something like Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is what you're looking for there. Output the data and consume it by something that can handle the analysis. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Bitcoin is the "narrow waist" of internet-based value
    These protocols prevent an O(N x M) explosion of code that have to solve for many cases. For example, since JSON is an almost ubiquitous format for wire transfer (although other things do exist like protobufs), if I had N data formats that I want to serialize, I only need to write N serializers/deserializers (SerDes). If there was no such narrow waist and there were M alternatives to JSON in wide usage, I would... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Understanding gRPC Concepts, Use Cases & Best Practices
    gRPC uses protocol buffers (it is an open source message format) as the default method of communication between client and server. Also, gRPC uses HTTP/ 2 as the default protocol. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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gRPC mentions (88)

  • Why Did Google Choose To Implement gRPC Using HTTP/2?
    gRPC is an open-source high-performance RPC framework developed by Google. The design goal of gRPC is to run in any environment, supporting pluggable load balancing, tracing, health checking, and authentication. It not only supports service calls within and across data centers but is also suitable for the last mile of distributed computing, connecting devices, mobile applications, and browsers to backend services.... - Source: dev.to / 10 days ago
  • Difference between GraphQL, REST, and gRPC
    And, gRPC is a high-performance, open-source protocol used for creating APIs. It uses Google's Protocol Buffers as a data format and provides support for streaming and bi-directional communication. - Source: dev.to / 17 days ago
  • Golang: out-of-box backpressure handling with gRPC, proven by a Grafana dashboard
    gRPC, built on HTTP/2, inherently supports flow control. The server can push updates, but it must also respect flow control signals from the client, ensuring that it doesn't send data faster than what the client can handle. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Delving Deeper: Enriching Microservices with Golang with CloudWeGo
    While gRPC and Apache Thrift have served the microservice architecture well, CloudWeGo's advanced features and performance metrics set it apart as a promising open source solution for the future. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Dart on the Server: Exploring Server-Side Dart Technologies in 2024
    The Dart implementation of gRPC which puts mobile and HTTP/2 first. It's built and maintained by the Dart team. Grpc is a high-performance RPC (remote procedure call) framework that is optimized for efficient data transfer. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Protobuf and gRPC, you can also consider the following products

Messagepack - An efficient binary serialization format.

Apache Thrift - An interface definition language and communication protocol for creating cross-language services.

Eureka - Eureka is a contact center and enterprise performance through speech analytics that immediately reveals insights from automated analysis of communications including calls, chat, email, texts, social media, surveys and more.

TOML - TOML - Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

GraphQL - GraphQL is a data query language and runtime to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps.

YAML - YAML 1.2 --- YAML: YAML Ain't Markup Language