Faye vs IronMQ

Faye is a publish-subscribe messaging system that uses the Bayeux protocol. It provides message servers for Node.js and Ruby, plus clients for servers and major web browsers. Browser clients rely on a Faye server to relay messages; they can retry after a lost connection and redeliver dropped messages. Transport adapters cover WebSocket, HTTP long-polling, Cross Origin Resource Sharing, and JSON-P callback-polling. Server and client extensions can intercept or modify messages, including to add subscription authentication. The monitoring API reports handshakes, subscriptions, unsubscriptions, publishes, and disconnections. Faye runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and can be self-hosted. Its default in-process engine cannot span multiple front-end web servers, but Redis and Couchbase engines are documented for distributed deployments. Faye is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license; the listed plan is free. Install the Node.js server through npm or the Ruby server through RubyGems.

IronMQ is a persistent message queue for communication between services and components in distributed applications. It supports push and pull queues, long polling, error queues, alerts, and triggers, as well as dead-letter queues and ordering within each queue. Delivery is described as best-effort and one-time, a behavior application teams should account for in message handling. Its HTTPS and REST-based APIs support HTTP/REST, Amazon SQS, and OpenStack Marconi protocols. During an outage, queues can automatically point to alternative availability zones without code changes. Deployment options include shared, dedicated, and on-premise environments. Documentation lists client libraries for Go, Ruby,.NET, Java, PHP, Python, Node, and Rust, plus community-supported Apache Camel and Clojure libraries. Iron.io says OAuth and SSL protect data in transit, and recommends client-side encryption for especially sensitive payloads at rest. The free Basic plan includes 100K API requests per month, limited queues, and a 64k message size limit. Entry costs $399 a month; a full-feature 14-day trial is offered for non-dedicated clusters.