# pgmq

6 Hacker News commenters recommended pgmq and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a Postgres-native queue: just tables and a thin wrapper, with clients in many languages, so it is easy to inspect.

## Why people recommend it

- Simple tables, easy to understand (2 comments): "look at the fifty or so lines of code that make up the thin wrapper around it, and understand it just as well as you understand BullMQ" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831901)) "Way easier than rabbitMQ. Pgmq though, is "just a bunch of tables". It's going to be a lot easier to figure out what's going on." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806785))
- Does the heavy lifting (2 comments): "it's built on pgmq (which does the heavy lifting, making it backend agnostic)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313828)) "pgmq does most of the work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49538392))
- Postgres queue already built (2 comments): "pgmq is exactly the Postgres queueing system that you would build from scratch, except it's already built" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46763014)) "ideally using something like pgmq" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45817548))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Apache Kafka](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-kafka.md): 53 recommend
- [NATS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nats.md): 34 recommend
- [Redpanda](https://hackerapproved.com/p/redpanda.md): 17 recommend
- [RabbitMQ](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rabbitmq.md): 13 recommend
- [PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgresql-listen-notify.md): 13 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "pgmq", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgmq/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).