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Thrift is what xooglers at Facebook implemented when they wanted Stubby. grpc is Google's own open source edition of Stubby.

They are very similar paradigm-wise.

Wait, what? IIRC Stubby is a lockserver, used for two things: coordinated locks, and small coordinated data. You mean protobuff, don't you? Am I misremembering and/or wrong?

You're thinking of chubby. :) https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub27897

I think they're rather similar in goals. I found this overview informative: https://youtu.be/RoXT_Rkg8LA

gRPC is protocol agnostic. You can use any wire type with it, like JSON. There's even a codec for thrift messages on gRPC called grift.

The main difference: grpc can do bidirectional streaming, and not only request-response RPC.