NATS JetStream
Shares rank 10 of 19 message brokers by recommenders
Recommended as a lightweight, easy-to-deploy persistence layer for NATS messaging, with high throughput and simple configuration. Critics report reliability bugs and data-storage failures.
Recommended as a lightweight, easy-to-deploy persistence layer for NATS messaging, with high throughput and simple configuration. Critics report reliability bugs and data-storage failures.
14 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 57%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, 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
Easy to configure, deploy and maintain
“NATS is far more lightweight, very simple to configure and deploy, has very few dependencies”
Comment from 2 May 2026 in “What is Apache Kafka and how does it work?” “it seemed nearly as featureful but also easier to maintain”
Comment from 19 Aug 2026 in “We turned off Pub/Sub and nobody noticed” “It is easy to manage and works great”
Comment from 25 Jan 2026 in “Small Kafka: Tansu and SQLite on a free t3.micro” Fault-tolerant built-in stream persistence
“NATS and its built-in Jetstream stream persistence engine are a miracle.”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Chatto is now Open Source” “NATS.io provides a fault-tolarent communication bit across networks”
Comment from 20 Jan 2026 in “Nats.io JetStream with PyTorch: lightweight compositional learning”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Reliability and data storage bugs
“The rest are not the kind of bugs you expect to see in a 5 year old persistence layer.”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1” “it's failing to deliver on the (advertised) basics of storing your data”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1” “Jetstream's reliability is horrifying apparently”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1”
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 |
| NATS JetStreamThis page | 8 | 6 | 57% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
All 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the amount of throughput is more then enough for any medium scale enterprise”
“it seemed nearly as featureful but also easier to maintain”
“it's incredibly easy to start consuming the Bluesky firehose”
“Thank you! Jetstream looks useful.”
“NATS and its built-in Jetstream stream persistence engine are a miracle.”
“NATS is far more lightweight, very simple to configure and deploy, has very few dependencies”
“Jetstream is a bit patchy”
“It is easy to manage and works great”
“NATS.io provides a fault-tolarent communication bit across networks”
“Jetstream's reliability is horrifying apparently”
“it's failing to deliver on the (advertised) basics of storing your data”
“The rest are not the kind of bugs you expect to see in a 5 year old persistence layer.”
“JetStream can only do a few K topics”
“Their docs makes some pretty bold claims about JetStream”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.