Messaging

MQTT

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport

Situational Formal standard OASIS Since 1999

Judgement: Situational

Excellent in IoT/edge, irrelevant outside it.

Lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol designed for constrained devices and unreliable networks. The dominant wire protocol for IoT and edge data.

Where AMQP and Kafka fit centralised broker patterns inside the data centre, MQTT is what shows up at the edge: sensors, vehicles, factory floors. Bridging MQTT into Kafka is a common ingest pattern for industrial data.

Example

Topic hierarchies with wildcards, quality-of-service per message, and retained values for late subscribers.

mosquitto_sub -h broker.example.com -t 'sensors/+/temperature' -q 1

mosquitto_pub -h broker.example.com -t 'sensors/rack-1/temperature' \
    -m '21.5' -q 1 --retain

At a glance

Category
Messaging
Governance
OASIS
Status
Stable; MQTT 5.0 standardised
First released
1999

Links

Related standards

Other standards in Messaging.

See MQTT in context

Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare MQTT against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.