Microservices Communication: gRPC vs. REST in Node.js

REST uses JSON over HTTP/1.1 (human-readable, widely supported); gRPC uses Protocol Buffers over HTTP/2 (binary, faster, type-safe).

In internal microservice-to-microservice communication, gRPC is often superior because: 1. Smaller payloads due to binary format, 2. Multiplexing over HTTP/2, 3. Strict schema definition (.proto files). REST is better for public APIs due to its simplicity and browser compatibility. Senior developers must decide based on latency requirements and developer experience (tooling for gRPC in Node is slightly more complex).