Software Alternatives & Reviews

Apache Thrift VS Protocol Buffers

Compare Apache Thrift VS Protocol Buffers and see what are their differences

Apache Thrift logo Apache Thrift

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

Protocol Buffers logo Protocol Buffers

A method for serializing and interchanging structured data.
  • Apache Thrift Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-07-12
  • Protocol Buffers Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-02

Apache Thrift videos

Apache Thrift

Protocol Buffers videos

Protocol Buffers- A Banked Journey - Christopher Reeves

More videos:

  • Review - justforfunc #30: The Basics of Protocol Buffers
  • Review - Complete Introduction to Protocol Buffers 3 : How are Protocol Buffers used?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache Thrift and Protocol Buffers)
Web Servers
89 89%
11% 11
Mobile Apps
0 0%
100% 100
Web And Application Servers
Configuration Management
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Protocol Buffers might be a bit more popular than Apache Thrift. We know about 15 links to it since March 2021 and only 12 links to Apache Thrift. 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.

Apache Thrift mentions (12)

  • 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 / 2 months ago
  • Reddit System Design/Architecture
    Services in general communicate via Thrift (and in some cases HTTP). Source: about 1 year ago
  • Universal type language!
    Protocol Buffers is the most popular one, but there are many others such as Apache Thrift and my own Typical. Source: about 1 year ago
  • You worked on it? Why is it slow then?
    RPC is not strictly OO, but you can think of RPC calls like method calls. In general it will reflect your interface design and doesn't have to be top-down, although a good project usually will look that way. A good contrast to REST where you use POST/PUT/GET/DELETE pattern on resources where as a procedure call could be a lot more flexible and potentially lighter weight. Think of it like defining methods in code... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Java Serialization with Protocol Buffers
    The information can be stored in a database or as files, serialized in a standard format and with a schema agreed with your Data Engineering team. Depending on your information and requirements, it can be as simple as CSV, XML or JSON, or Big Data formats such as Parquet, Avro, ORC, Arrow, or message serialization formats like Protocol Buffers, FlatBuffers, MessagePack, Thrift, or Cap'n Proto. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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Protocol Buffers mentions (15)

  • Did OpenTelemetry deliver on its promise in 2023?
    > Aren’t a standard You mean like an IETF standard? That is true, although the specification is quite simple to implement. It is certainly a de-facto standard, even if it hasn’t been standardized by the IETF or IEEE or ANSI or ECMA. > inherently limits anything built on top of them to not be a standard either I’m not sure that strictly follows. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9232 for example directly... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • How to Keep a History of MQTT Data With Node.js
    The MQTT protocol is widely used in IoT applications because of its simplicity and ability to connect different data sources to applications using a publish/subscribe model. While many MQTT brokers support persistent sessions and can store message history as long as an MQTT client is not available, there may be cases where data needs to be stored for a longer period. In such cases, it is recommended to use a time... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Dive into Mocking Your Microservice Dependencies with Skyramp
    Generate a mock from an API definition Skyramp simplifies the process of mocking by allowing you to generate mocks directly from your API definitions, such as OpenAPI or Protobuf. This means you can easily create realistic mocks that mimic the behavior of your actual microservices. With the Skyramp CLI, it's as easy as running skyramp mocker generate ... With the relevant inputs. See the Skyramp Docs for which... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Introducing Persisted Copilot Chats - Integrated AI Across your Workflow
    Tsavo also touched upon how consistency is also crucial at the SDK level and the data layer. A fun fact about our company is that a majority of our client-side SDKs are generated off of protobuf specs or HTTP open API specs. This means that when a new endpoint with a certain capability is released, we can quickly have it available in Kotlin, TypeScript, Dart, Rust, Go, and some other languages. This rapid... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • A small warning about UDP based protocols
    This is a bit similar to roll your own crypto conversation. It is fun, and a great way to learn. And once done, you should do well to never deploy your own crypto in any real life application. Friends don't let friends roll their own protocol over UDP (or IP; I mean why not?). There are very few apps that have such an explicit requirements that they can't do away with TLS over any number of existing, and well... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Thrift and Protocol Buffers, you can also consider the following products

gRPC - Application and Data, Languages & Frameworks, Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and Service Discovery

Messagepack - An efficient binary serialization format.

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

Docker Hub - Docker Hub is a cloud-based registry service

Eno - Fast, human readable, plain-text data format