On GitHub, Akka has 14659 commits, 82 branches, 150 releases, and 188 contributors. Quasar has 1753 commits, 14 branches, 9 releases, and 7 contributors.
All other statistics are also massively in favor of Akka (just look at the numbers for this past week, or the number of contributors that are really active in both projects).
Akka is serious business software, that companies can safely rely on, without gambling their money. It is easy to use, performant, low risk, and has an incredible team of very capable developers who have been perfecting it for years. And "serious and safe" does not at all mean static: they constantly keep pushing the state of the art (I didn't see anything in the article about Akka Streams, Spark, the upcoming typed actors, any emphasis on the usefulness of message persistence, ...).
If you want to challenge the market leader, you will need more than biased reviews: you will need more people working on it, more activity, and real-life success stories.
I'm not affiliated with either horse in this race, but it would be good for you to explain exactly what about those repo statistics favors Akka. Seems like the numbers are larger, of course, but I'm aware of no relationship between any of those numbers and project quality. Or anything else, for that matter.
When you choose the backbone of your architecture, there are other things to consider, in addition to technical aspects. The numbers I mentioned give an indication of some of those aspects.
If I look at Quasar in GitHub, it seems to have only two developers who are really active: the same two people who are writing on this thread. Let’s say I adopt Quasar and base my architecture on it. What happens when these guys land a big project paying big money with a big client? Will they have time to fix issues? Will they have time to develop new features? Will the big client dictate the direction of new developments?
Look at Akka on the other side. They have people like Jonas Bonér, Viktor Klang, Roland Kuhn, Mathias Doenitz, etc. People who are not only amazing developers, but who are also thought leaders. These guys publish books on the subject, speak at conferences, conduct massive online training, and have industry recognition. And they are just the tip of the iceberg. They have a team of less-famous but equally amazing rock star delelopers working with them. Akka gets more solid as time progresses, not only technically but also in terms of market perception.
On which of the two horses would you place your bet?
Quasar may have its technical merits, but unless it comes up with a really compelling feature that gives it a sustainable advantage against Akka, it has no chance of winning.
