Software Alternatives & Reviews

JSON VS Protocol Buffers

Compare JSON VS Protocol Buffers and see what are their differences

JSON logo JSON

(JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format

Protocol Buffers logo Protocol Buffers

A method for serializing and interchanging structured data.
  • JSON Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-28
  • Protocol Buffers Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-02

JSON videos

Parsing JSON Review - Part 1

More videos:

  • Review - Parsing JSON Review - Part 2
  • Review - JSon Foreign Vol.1 Review

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 JSON and Protocol Buffers)
Mobile Apps
66 66%
34% 34
Configuration Management
65 65%
35% 35
Software Development
100 100%
0% 0
Web Servers
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using JSON and Protocol Buffers. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Protocol Buffers might be a bit more popular than JSON. We know about 15 links to it since March 2021 and only 13 links to JSON. 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.

JSON mentions (13)

  • The Last Breaking Change | JSON Schema Blog
    The YAML 0.1 spec was sent to a public user group in May 2001. JSON was named in a State Software internal discussion. State Software was founded in March 2001. json.org was launched in 2002. Therefore you’re just wrong: YAML came out before JSON. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Why does wine give warnings about using 64bit prefixes, or has 32bit packages? Hasn't the world moved on from 32 bit a century ago?
    How come that doesn't apply to other libraries? For example, when I write Java or Node.js programs, I don't need to make sure packages like json.org or express.js have a 32bit or 64bit environment. What makes windows libs different than NPM libs? Source: over 1 year ago
  • “Ignore the f'ing haters ” And other lessons learned from creating a popular
    The first two sentences of the text on http://json.org are "JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write." It's a primary goal of JSON, it's fair to question whether it's successful at it. Personally, I'd much rather write TOML or S expressions. I don't like YAML at all, the whitespace sensitivity drives me nuts. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Recording your JSON data to MCAP, a file format that support multiple serialization formats
    To help you make the transition, we’ve written a tutorial on how to write an MCAP writer in Python to record JSON data to an MCAP file. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • replace \" with "
    What you need to probably do is to step back and learn the format for JSON, and the core data structures that you will find in most languages:. Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

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
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

TOML - TOML - Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

Messagepack - An efficient binary serialization format.

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

Microsoft Office Access - Access is now much more than a way to create desktop databases. It’s an easy-to-use tool for quickly creating browser-based database applications.

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

JSONFormatter.org - Online JSON Formatter and JSON Validator will format JSON data, and helps to validate, convert JSON to XML, JSON to CSV. Save and Share JSON