pgmq
Shares rank 13 of 19 message brokers by recommenders
Recommended as a Postgres-native queue: just tables and a thin wrapper, with clients in many languages, so it is easy to inspect.
Recommended as a Postgres-native queue: just tables and a thin wrapper, with clients in many languages, so it is easy to inspect.
7 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 86%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 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
Simple tables, easy to understand
“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”
Comment from 6 Nov 2025 in “"You Don't Need Kafka, Just Use Postgres" Considered Harmful” “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.”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “You probably don't need another database” Does the heavy lifting
“it's built on pgmq (which does the heavy lifting, making it backend agnostic)”
Comment from 28 May 2026 in “Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows” “pgmq does most of the work”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Ending my elixir exploratory writing” Postgres queue already built
“pgmq is exactly the Postgres queueing system that you would build from scratch, except it's already built”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems” “ideally using something like pgmq”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “"You Don't Need Kafka, Just Use Postgres" Considered Harmful”
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 |
| pgmqThis page | 6 | 1 | 86% | 7 | — | — |
What people said
11 of the 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“pgmq does most of the work”
“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.”
“it doesn't implement proper locking/dequeuing”
“it's built on pgmq (which does the heavy lifting, making it backend agnostic)”
“pgclaw would pair well with pgmq and pg_cron”
“gets very close for a lot of Kafka use cases”
“This is the killer combo.”
“pgmq is exactly the Postgres queueing system that you would build from scratch, except it's already built”
“We use pgmq with the pgmq-go client, and it has clients in many different languages, it's amazing.”
“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”
“ideally using something like pgmq”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.