Protobuf VS cereal

Compare Protobuf vs cereal and see what are their differences.

cereal

A C++11 library for serialization (by USCiLab)
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Protobuf cereal
171 13
63,263 3,968
0.9% 1.1%
10.0 1.3
7 days ago 29 days ago
C++ C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
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.

Protobuf

Posts with mentions or reviews of Protobuf. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-09.

cereal

Posts with mentions or reviews of cereal. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-12-19.
  • Ser20, a C++20 fork of cereal
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 19 Dec 2022
    Where? Do you happen to have a pointer? Github has version 1.3.2 from February.
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 19 Dec 2022
  • Added reflection to C++ just to make my game work.
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 27 Oct 2022
    I'd stick with cereal for serialization
  • Cereal Pack - a C++ schema serialization library
    4 projects | /r/cpp | 24 Jun 2022
  • Is there any good binary serializer & deserializer for C / C++?
    5 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 4 Jun 2022
  • Pataro II: Pataro Harder
    3 projects | dev.to | 13 Nov 2021
    Today I'm back to working on Pataro, the roguelike built on libtcod that made up much of my Hacktoberfest efforts. I had been assigned to an issue requesting the addition of serialization and deserialization, but unfortunately ran out of time and wasn't able to finish the former or start the latter. I ran into issues with Cereal, and had a hard time figuring out the structure of the program and how to go about implementing serialization for all the relevant components. At the end of that attempt I mentioned that if I were to try again I'd start by testing out Cereal separately and getting a handle on that before trying to implement it in Pataro - so that's what I'm doing today.
  • Hacktoberfest 5
    7 projects | dev.to | 4 Nov 2021
    I am once again working on Pataro today, and I've succeeded in clearing up some issues and creating new ones. I've been stuck on an issue where Visual Studio was raising errors in the portion of the code where I call the cereal archive on some types, but was able to clear up that issue by moving the save function definitions out of their respective headers and into the corresponding .cpp files. Examining this repo and its use of cereal again, I was able to get a bit clearer of an idea of how it's implemented, and I included just about every relevant cereal header I could find to try and avoid any issues like the previous one popping up again (with the intention of later removing whichever I can to avoid redundant inclusions).
  • Hacktoberfest 4
    6 projects | dev.to | 2 Nov 2021
    On the Pataro front, I've started looking at other examples of people using cereal for their games. It seems to be a popular choice for roguelike games like this, so hopefully I can figure out both the syntax problems I'm facing, as well as logical ones like how the program should be structured to have all the necessary data properly serialized and deserialized.
  • Hacktoberfest 3
    4 projects | dev.to | 1 Nov 2021
    Progress on one front but roadblocks on another. After my post yesterday outlining my plans to add serialization to Pataro I ran into some issues with calling the archive class in cereal wherein the call wouldn't go through due to an incorrect number of arguments. This happened with both vector and size_t data members, and I'm still investigating why.
  • Binary serialization library for at least C++17?
    6 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 10 Oct 2021
    This is the simplest serialization library I saw. You only need to add one method to your class and you can stream it to desired archive. It supports binary as well as json, XML and others. https://github.com/USCiLab/cereal

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Protobuf and cereal you can also consider the following projects:

FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library

SBE - Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) - High Performance Message Codec

MessagePack - MessagePack implementation for C and C++ / msgpack.org[C/C++]

Apache Parquet - Apache Parquet

Bond - Bond is a cross-platform framework for working with schematized data. It supports cross-language de/serialization and powerful generic mechanisms for efficiently manipulating data. Bond is broadly used at Microsoft in high scale services.

Boost.Serialization - Boost.org serialization module

Protobuf.NET - Protocol Buffers library for idiomatic .NET

Apache Avro - Apache Avro is a data serialization system.

Cap'n Proto - Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library

protostuff - Java serialization library, proto compiler, code generator