About NATS Studio

A free, open-source desktop client for NATS — built because working with a message broker shouldn't mean living in a terminal.

What NATS Studio is

NATS Studio is a cross-platform desktop application for NATS, the open-source messaging system. It gives you a real graphical interface for the things developers do with NATS every day: opening connections, publishing and subscribing to subjects, inspecting message payloads, and managing JetStream streams, consumers, Key-Value buckets, and the Object Store.

It runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The backend is written in Rust and the interface is rendered through Tauri, so the whole application ships as a single native binary — there is no Electron runtime, no local web server, and no browser tab.

The project exists because the alternative — juggling nats CLI invocations across several terminal windows while trying to reason about stream state — makes routine work harder than it needs to be. NATS Studio puts connection state, live message flow, and JetStream management in one window you can actually look at.

What it does

  • Connections — saved profiles with TLS and mTLS support; credentials are stored in the operating system keychain, never in plaintext configuration files.
  • Live Tail — subscribe to any subject or wildcard and watch messages arrive in real time, each subscription filtered on its own tab, with a payload viewer that decodes JSON, Protobuf, MessagePack, text, hex, and base64.
  • Publisher and Request–Reply — compose messages in any of those formats, with reusable templates, variable substitution, and burst sending.
  • JetStream — create, edit, purge, and delete streams and consumers; browse stored messages by sequence; replay history from a specific sequence number or timestamp.
  • Key-Value and Object Store — read and write buckets, and stream large objects to and from disk with live progress reporting.
  • Monitoring — server health, throughput, and round-trip latency, read from the NATS monitoring endpoint.

Who maintains it

NATS Studio is built and maintained by Himanshu Chavda, an independent software developer. It is a personal open-source project, not a commercial product, and it is not affiliated with Synadia or the official NATS project. NATS is a trademark of its respective owner.

Development happens in the open on GitHub. Issues and pull requests are welcome — if you use NATS and something is missing or does not work well, that feedback directly shapes what gets built next. You can reach the maintainer at himanshu.tech.profile@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.

License and cost

NATS Studio is released under the MIT License. It is free to download and free to use, for personal and commercial work alike, with no account, no license key, and no paid tier. The complete source code is published at github.com/himanshu-systems/nats-studio.

The application collects no telemetry and sends no analytics. It talks to the NATS servers you point it at, and to GitHub when checking for updates — nothing else.