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Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) offers significant advantages over JSON for API development through strong typing, binary serialization, and automatic code generation. While JSON remains popular for its human readability and flexibility, Protobuf provides 3x smaller payload sizes, type safety across multiple languages, and eliminates manual validation errors. The article demonstrates practical implementation using Dart and the Shelf framework, showing how Protobuf can be used independently of gRPC in traditional HTTP APIs. The main trade-off is reduced human readability of binary data, requiring schema files and specialized tooling for debugging.

Better than JSON

Proto — Strong typing and modern tooling

Buffer — Ultra-efficient binary serialization

Example: a tiny Dart server using Shelf that returns Protobuf

However… JSON still keeps one important advantage

&lt;humor&gt;
XML is still the best
&lt;/humor&gt;

Proto isn’t a format. It’s a protocol.
But we use proto for data transfer In our Node.js / GoLang solution, but protobuff has no good support.
<ul>
<li>VS Code has extension for proto from unknown publisher (3 years ago last update) The most popular one <a href="https://github.com/zxh0/vscode-proto3" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://github.com/zxh0/vscode-proto3</a></li>
<li>Client and server generators for Go and Node.js have many bugs we should find workaround for. For example GoLang generator process zero-value in “enum” like undefined, even if it’s value ‘0’, not null.</li>
</ul>

JSON is extremely simple to start with, fast and reliably. Even if Protobuf fits in certain scenarios, I would probably start out simple with JSON and perhaps switch later, if the project requires fast growth.

Dart is the example language? json is omnipresent because it’s available used in a wide range of languages. protobuf isn’t.

“Better” is highly dependent on your use case. Most of us are not operating at google scale, so the measurable benefit of the smaller payload is negligible. Instant readability of the JSON payload in logs is invaluable when it comes to debugging - without needing to unmarshal a binary payload in your code as you would with protobuf.