About Varisai
Why we built it
We kept rebuilding the same glue on every project: a retry loop here, a dead-letter table there, a cron job for delayed jobs, and a Slack thread titled "why wasn't this processed?". Kafka gave us a log but no per-message state; RabbitMQ gave us delivery but forgot the message afterwards. Both asked us to pick a partition or queue layout before we knew the workload.
Varisai is the system we wanted instead. Every message carries a key, and that key is the unit of ordering and parallelism. Retries, backoff, dead-lettering, scheduled delivery, and tracing are broker features you declare once, not code you write in every consumer.
How it is licensed
The source is public under the Elastic License 2.0. You can use it, self-host it, and modify it for free. The one thing you cannot do is offer it to third parties as a hosted service — that is how we fund the work, through Varisai Cloud and enterprise support.
Who is behind it
- Organisation
- Higglers Lab
- Source code
- github.com/higglerslab/varisai
- Runs on
- Node.js and MongoDB (any replica set, including Atlas)
- Contact
- The contact form — a real person replies within one business day
Where to go next
- The overview — the key model in thirty seconds.
- The comparison — Varisai vs Kafka, SQS FIFO, and RabbitMQ, including when not to pick it.
- The API reference — every endpoint, payload, and error code.
- The FAQ — the guarantees and the honest limits.