grpc-web VS Centrifugo

Compare grpc-web vs Centrifugo and see what are their differences.

grpc-web

gRPC for Web Clients (by grpc)

Centrifugo

Scalable real-time messaging server in a language-agnostic way. Self-hosted alternative to Pubnub, Pusher, Ably. Set up once and forever. (by centrifugal)
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grpc-web Centrifugo
33 31
8,245 7,815
1.2% 1.5%
6.5 9.0
21 days ago about 23 hours ago
JavaScript Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

grpc-web

Posts with mentions or reviews of grpc-web. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-14.
  • Ask HN: WebSocket server transforming channel subscriptions to gRPC streams
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Aug 2023
    * Additionally, client can stream data to the backend server (if bidirectional GRPC streams are used). I.e. client sends WebSocket messages, those will be transformed to GRPC messages by WebSocket server and delivered to the application backend.

    As a result we have a system which allows to quickly create individual streams by using strict GRPC contract but terminating connections over WebSocket transport. So it works well in web browsers. After that no need to write WebSocket protocol, client implementation, handle WebSocket connection. This all will be solved by a suggested WebSocket server and its client SDKs.

    The mechanics is similar to Websocketd (https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd), but instead of creating OS processes we create GRPC streams. The difference from grpc-web (https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web) is that we provide streaming capabilities but not exposing GRPC contract to the client - just allowing to stream any data as payload (both binary and text) with some wrappers from our client SDKs side for managing subscriptions. I.e. it's not native GRPC streams on the client side - we expose just Connection/Subscription object to stream in both directions. GRPC streams used only for communication between WebSocket server and backend. To mention - grpc-web does not support all kinds of streaming now (https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web#streaming-support) while proposed solution can. This all should provide a cross-platform way to quickly write streaming apps due to client SDKs and language-agnostic nature of GRPC.

    I personally see both pros and cons in this scheme (without concentrating on both too much here to keep the question short). I spent some time thinking about this myself, already have some working prototypes – but turned out need more opinions before moving forward with the idea and releasing this, kinda lost in doubts.

    My main question - whether this seems interesting for someone here? Do you find this useful and see practical value?

  • Build and Deploy a gRPC-Web App Using Rust Tonic and React
    7 projects | dev.to | 19 Jul 2023
    By default, web browsers do not support gRPC, but we will use gRPC-web to make it possible.
  • Lemmy v0.18.0 Release - A reddit alternative written in Rust.
    2 projects | /r/rust | 23 Jun 2023
    You just have to use a library implementation for JavaScript https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web
  • Full Stack Forays with Go and gRPC
    5 projects | dev.to | 5 Jun 2023
    TypeScript support remains an experimental feature of gRPC.
  • Introducing Tempo: low latency, cross-platform, end-to-end typesafe APIs
    12 projects | /r/programming | 2 May 2023
    The gRPC-Web protocol supports HTTP/1 and can be used from a browser.
  • gRPC on the client side
    9 projects | dev.to | 16 Mar 2023
    -- grpc-web
  • gRPC vs REST: Comparing API Styles in Practice
    6 projects | dev.to | 21 Feb 2023
    Since we're using Envoy, there's one more neat trick that we can employ. It turns out that Envoy also support gRPC-Web out of the box, a JavaScript client designed to support gRPC communication from the browser! That means that we can send gRPC messages over HTTP/1.1 as base64 encoded strings or as binary protobufs. Messages will be sent through our proxy and on to our backend service. The advantage of this is smaller and more efficient wire communication which should lead to better performance.
  • Understanding gRPC Concepts, Use Cases & Best Practices
    9 projects | dev.to | 15 Jan 2023
    protoc-gen-grpc-web — a plugin that allows our front end to communicate with the backend using gRPC calls. A separate blog post on this coming up in the future.
  • Ask HN: Why isn't JSON-RPC more widely adopted?
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2023
    Personally, find gRPC-Web very attractive but the current state of TypeScript/JS code-gen is very confusing and lacking.

    I would love something like https://orval.dev for gRPC-web. Have I missed something or is it just early to expect it?

    I tried a few libraries but couldn't get them to work or would generate unappealing results. I believe I'm hitting this issue with my local experiments. https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web/issues/535

  • You worked on it? Why is it slow then?
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 13 Nov 2022
    Seeing this I went right into the code and found the gem, grpc-web is responsible for browser support. Official Docs

Centrifugo

Posts with mentions or reviews of Centrifugo. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-20.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing grpc-web and Centrifugo you can also consider the following projects:

Socket.io - Realtime application framework (Node.JS server)

NATS - Golang client for NATS, the cloud native messaging system.

Confluent Kafka Golang Client - Confluent's Apache Kafka Golang client

Mercure - 🪽 An open, easy, fast, reliable and battery-efficient solution for real-time communications

laravel-websockets - Websockets for Laravel. Done right.

ngx-grpc - Angular gRPC framework

grpc-over-webrtc - gRPC over WebRTC

Uniqush-Push - Uniqush is a free and open source software system which provides a unified push service for server side notification to apps on mobile devices.

soketi - Next-gen, Pusher-compatible, open-source WebSockets server. Simple, fast, and resilient. 📣

Pusher - Ruby library for Pusher Channels HTTP API

grpcurl - Like cURL, but for gRPC: Command-line tool for interacting with gRPC servers

websocket - A fast, well-tested and widely used WebSocket implementation for Go.