Disclaimer: I have not used Go, hence my knowledge on that part is limited.Go Channels model closely the semantics of(Hoare, 1978) while Akka actors implement the(Hewitt, 1973). Both describe independent processes which communicate via message passing. The main difference is that a message exchange is synchronous in CSP (i.e. a “touch point” of the execution of two processes where they hand over the message) whereas it is completely decoupled in the Actor model, with message delivery being unconfirmed to the sender and taking an arbitrary amount of time. In consequence Actors enjoy much larger independence from each other, since they can choose when to handle which incoming message based on their own state. In Go the programmer must foresee the right sequence of checking for different incoming messages in order not to block the program from making progress. The benefit is that Channels do not need to buffer messages, while Actors require a mailbox of theoretically unbounded size.Another consequence of decoupling the sending of a message from its processing at the receiver is that it becomes trivial to run both on different network nodes without user-visible change in semantics. It also allows the receiver to be unavailable (e.g. due to a software or hardware failure) without affecting the sender beyond not getting a reply.In summary Channels are useful for orchestrating concurrent execution in a tightly controlled environment whereas Actors provide an abstraction for loosely coupled, distributed components.