Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Shares rank 16 of 19 message brokers by recommenders
People recommend it as a managed messaging service that needs little upkeep, scales well, and handles batching, compression and duplicate-free delivery.
People recommend it as a managed messaging service that needs little upkeep, scales well, and handles batching, compression and duplicate-free delivery.
7 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 71%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 2.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Named among best-in-class Google Cloud services
“BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, GKE are all best-in-class.”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue” “Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few.”
Comment from 31 Jan 2026 in “Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native”
Other message brokers people recommend
The four most recommended other message brokers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache Kafka | 53 | 55 | 49% | 12 | — | — |
| NATS | 34 | 16 | 68% | 9 | 7.5 yrs3 owners | Approved |
| Amazon SQS | 18 | 14 | 56% | 8 | — | — |
| Redpanda | 17 | 4 | 81% | 7 | — | Approved |
| Google Cloud Pub/SubThis page | 5 | 2 | 71% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
All 7 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, GKE are all best-in-class.”
“PubSub does compression, batching, and does not send duplicate messages”
“Google PubSub is a great product.”
“GKE pub/sub seems pretty costly by comparison.”
“the 'Serialization Tax' always wins”
“Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few.”
“Pub/Sub is something you don't need to maintain and will scale better than this solution”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.