RSMQ vs Starling: What are the differences?

Developers describe RSMQ as "A lightweight message queue for Node.js that requires no dedicated queue server. Just a Redis server". tl;dr: If you run a Redis server and currently use Amazon SQS or a similar message queue you might as well use this fast little replacement. Using a shared Redis server multiple Node.js processes can send / receive messages. On the other hand, Starling is detailed as "A light weight server for reliable distributed message passing". Starling is a powerful but simple messaging server that enables reliable distributed queuing with an absolutely minimal overhead. It speaks the MemCache protocol for maximum cross-platform compatibility. Any language that speaks MemCache can take advantage of Starling's queue facilities.

RSMQ and Starling can be primarily classified as "Message Queue" tools.

Some of the features offered by RSMQ are:

• Lightweight: Just Redis and ~500 lines of javascript.
• Guaranteed delivery of a message to exactly one recipient within a messages visibility timeout.
• Received messages that are not deleted will reappear after the visibility timeout.

On the other hand, Starling provides the following key features:

• Written by Blaine Cook at Twitter
• Starling is a Message Queue Server based on MemCached
• Written in Ruby

RSMQ and Starling are both open source tools. RSMQ with 1.07K GitHub stars and 78 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Starling with 468 GitHub stars and 63 GitHub forks.