Software Alternatives & Reviews

Protobuf VS JSON

Compare Protobuf VS JSON and see what are their differences

Protobuf logo Protobuf

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

JSON logo JSON

(JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format
  • Protobuf Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29
  • JSON Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-28

Protobuf videos

StreamBerry, part 2 : introduction to Google ProtoBuf

JSON videos

Parsing JSON Review - Part 1

More videos:

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Protobuf and JSON)
Configuration Management
66 66%
34% 34
Mobile Apps
63 63%
37% 37
Application And Data
100 100%
0% 0
Software Development
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Protobuf should be more popular than JSON. It has been mentiond 82 times since March 2021. 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 / about 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: about 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: about 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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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
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

TOML - TOML - Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

Messagepack - An efficient binary serialization format.

Axisbase - Axisbase is a database framework that you can use to track whatever sort of data your business manages.

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.