TYO MQ: The Messaging Backbone for Real-Time Business

Look closely at any modern business system and you'll find the same thing underneath: events. An order is placed. A payment is captured. A sensor reports. A customer clicks. The systems that feel effortless are the ones where those events flow instantly and reliably to every part of the business that needs them — and the systems that creak are the ones gluing it together with polling, cron jobs, and hope.

TYO MQ is the messaging backbone that makes the first kind of system easy. It's a publish/subscribe service that moves events between your applications, your background workers, and — unusually for a message queue — all the way to your users' browsers, live. It is open source, free to run, and small enough to understand: one Node.js server, one npm install, no fleet of brokers to babysit.

Real-time when you want it, guaranteed when you need it

Most messaging tools force a choice. The real-time ones (WebSocket services, Redis pub/sub) lose messages the moment a consumer goes offline. The reliable ones (traditional brokers) are heavyweight, operationally demanding, and stop at the server — reaching a browser means bolting on yet another system.

TYO MQ deliberately does both, on one connection:

• Fire-and-forget by default. Live dashboards, chat, presence, tickers — events fan out to every subscriber instantly, with no ceremony.
• Durable delivery when it matters. Mark a subscription durable and the server queues messages while the consumer is down, replays them on reconnect, waits for acknowledgements, retries on a schedule you set, and moves poison messages to a dead-letter queue where an operator can see exactly what failed and why — nothing is silently dropped.

What's in the box

Smart routing. MQTT-style hierarchical topics with wildcards (orders/sydney/+/status, factory/#) let one subscription cover a whole fleet of devices or an entire order book. Consumer groups load-balance work across a pool of workers; broadcast sends one copy to every member of a group or an entire realm.

Multi-tenant security. TYO MQ's realms give each customer, team, or environment its own isolated namespace on one server — same event names, zero crosstalk. Authentication supports opaque tokens, HS256 JWTs, per-realm pre-shared keys, or your existing auth service, and new integrations onboard through a signed approval workflow — no shared secrets pasted around. A built-in web manager UI handles it all.

Persistence and scale. Start in memory, persist queues to SQLite with one config line, or move to Redis and run a cluster of TYO MQ nodes that share settings, relay live messages, and let durable subscribers reconnect anywhere.

Operations built in. An opt-in, read-only HTTP API serves /health for load balancers, Prometheus metrics, per-realm stats, and dead-letter queue contents — on the same port, with nothing extra to deploy.

Browser-native. The bundled browser client speaks the same API as the Node.js client. Your web pages become first-class subscribers — no separate "real-time push" vendor, no per-message fees.

Speaks your languages. Official client libraries cover Python, Go, Rust, C/C++, Java, C#/.NET, and Ruby alongside Node.js and the browser — all speaking the same wire protocol, with the same durable-delivery and topic options. A Python service, a Go worker, a Java backend, and a web dashboard can share one event backbone without a bridge in sight.

See it, don't take our word for it

The tyo-mq-samples repository holds eight runnable mini-apps — a Stripe-style webhook delivery service, a background job queue, a live operations dashboard, an IoT fleet, event-driven microservices, a multi-tenant event hub, a compliance audit trail, and a browser chat room. Every one starts its own server in-process: clone, npm install, run, and watch it work in your terminal or browser within a minute.

Explore TYO MQ

Open source, with a company behind it

TYO MQ is free under the Apache-2.0 licence — use it commercially, self-host it, modify it, no strings. Development happens in the open at github.com/tyolab/tyo-mq.

And because it's a core TYO Lab product, it doesn't come with the usual open-source gamble: we build on it ourselves, and our software development team is available for integration work, custom features, and production support — from an Australian company, in an Australian timezone.

Ready to move your events in real time? Get started in five minutes, browse the sample applications, or talk to us about what you're building.