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How does this compare with NATS?

NATS is a simpler PUB/SUB system that delivers in the UNIX spirit of small composable parts. Apache Pulsar or Apache Kafka deliver the banana, the ape holding it and the rest of the jungle.

Check out Liftbridge (https://liftbridge.io) as a way to add these capabilities to NATS.

your FAQ still says it's not production ready? Is this still the case, I've been keeping my eye on this project

It's getting very close. I had wanted to make a production-ready 1.0 release before the end of the year, but we're in the process of switching from protobuf to flatbuffers. Once that is complete, a stable release will be made.

NATS is ephemeral pub/sub only. There is no persistence or replay, but focuses on high performance and messaging patterns like request/reply.

Kafka and Pulsar persist every message and different consumers can replay the stream from their own positions. Pulsar also supports ephemeral pub/sub like NATS with a lot more advanced features.

NATS does have the NATS Streaming project for persistence and replay but it has scalability issues. They're working on a new project called Jetstream to replace this in the future.

"Scalability issues" makes it sound like a blocer. I'd rephrase is as "doesn't support horizontal scaling which might be a limit to some".

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