From what I&#x27;ve read of the spec so far: msgpack has a confusion between text and binary data baked into it that will probably never be resolved, and CBOR deliberately fixes that.<p>It also seems to have a better implementation of streaming data than msgpack. In msgpack, streaming is something you have to implement outside of the format itself, possibly by concatenating together many msgpack representations. CBOR has a way to say &quot;here comes a streaming list, I&#x27;ll tell you when it&#x27;s done&quot;.<p>BSON is a representation of MongoDB&#x27;s data model and doesn&#x27;t make that much sense to use without MongoDB.<p>I currently use msgpack for a lot of things, but if CBOR&#x27;s Python library is good enough, I might switch.