Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

RabbitMQ VS Apache Kafka

Compare RabbitMQ VS Apache Kafka and see what are their differences

RabbitMQ logo RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.
  • RabbitMQ Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03
  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01

RabbitMQ features and specs

  • Reliability
    RabbitMQ ensures message durability by persisting messages to disk. This enhances reliability, especially for critical applications where message loss is unacceptable.
  • Flexibility
    RabbitMQ supports multiple messaging protocols like AMQP, MQTT, and STOMP, allowing diverse applications to communicate seamlessly.
  • Advanced Features
    RabbitMQ offers rich features such as message routing, delivery acknowledgments, and clustering, which can satisfy complex messaging needs.
  • Ease of Use
    RabbitMQ provides extensive documentation and user-friendly management tools, making it accessible for developers and administrators.
  • Scalability
    Its clustering and federated queues capabilities allow RabbitMQ to scale both vertically and horizontally to handle increased loads.
  • Transaction Support
    RabbitMQ provides support for transactions, ensuring that a series of operations can be executed atomically, which is crucial for maintaining data integrity.

Possible disadvantages of RabbitMQ

  • Complex Configuration
    Setting up and configuring RabbitMQ can be complex, especially for users who are unfamiliar with messaging brokers or have limited experience with it.
  • Overhead
    RabbitMQ can introduce overhead in terms of latency and resource consumption, which might be an issue for high-performance applications requiring low latency.
  • Maintenance
    Maintaining RabbitMQ, including tasks such as monitoring, managing clusters, and handling updates, requires ongoing effort and expertise.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its feature-rich nature and various configurations, there can be a steep learning curve for new users to master RabbitMQ.
  • Performance Issues with High Volume
    In extremely high-volume scenarios, RabbitMQ may experience performance bottlenecks and memory issues, requiring careful tuning and scaling strategies.
  • Security Considerations
    Proper security configuration, including user roles, permissions, and encryption, is essential but can be complex and critical for preventing unauthorized access.

Apache Kafka features and specs

  • High Throughput
    Kafka is capable of handling thousands of messages per second due to its distributed architecture, making it suitable for applications that require high throughput.
  • Scalability
    Kafka can easily scale horizontally by adding more brokers to a cluster, making it highly scalable to serve increased loads.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Kafka has built-in replication, ensuring that data is replicated across multiple brokers, providing fault tolerance and high availability.
  • Durability
    Kafka ensures data durability by writing data to disk, which can be replicated to other nodes, ensuring data is not lost even if a broker fails.
  • Real-time Processing
    Kafka supports real-time data streaming, enabling applications to process and react to data as it arrives.
  • Decoupling of Systems
    Kafka acts as a buffer and decouples the production and consumption of messages, allowing independent scaling and management of producers and consumers.
  • Wide Ecosystem
    The Kafka ecosystem includes various tools and connectors such as Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and KSQL, which enrich the functionality of Kafka.
  • Strong Community Support
    Kafka has strong community support and extensive documentation, making it easier for developers to find help and resources.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Kafka

  • Complex Setup and Management
    Kafka's distributed nature can make initial setup and ongoing management complex, requiring expert knowledge and significant administrative effort.
  • Operational Overhead
    Running Kafka clusters involves additional operational overhead, including hardware provisioning, monitoring, tuning, and scaling.
  • Latency Sensitivity
    Despite its high throughput, Kafka may experience increased latency in certain scenarios, especially when configured for high durability and consistency.
  • Learning Curve
    The concepts and architecture of Kafka can be difficult for new users to grasp, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Hardware Intensive
    Kafka's performance characteristics often require dedicated and powerful hardware, which can be costly to procure and maintain.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing Kafka's dependencies and ensuring compatibility between versions of Kafka, Zookeeper, and other ecosystem tools can be challenging.
  • Limited Support for Small Messages
    Kafka is optimized for large throughput and can be inefficient for applications that require handling a lot of small messages, where overhead can become significant.
  • Operational Complexity for Small Teams
    Smaller teams might find the operational complexity and maintenance burden of Kafka difficult to manage without a dedicated operations or DevOps team.

RabbitMQ videos

數據工程 | 快速review | 如何架設Docker Swarm + RabbitMQ??

More videos:

  • Review - What's New in RabbitMQ—June 2012 Edition
  • Review - Feature complete: Uncovering the true cost different RabbitMQ features and configs - Jack Vanlightly

Apache Kafka videos

Apache Kafka Tutorial | What is Apache Kafka? | Kafka Tutorial for Beginners | Edureka

More videos:

  • Review - Apache Kafka - Getting Started - Kafka Multi-node Cluster - Review Properties
  • Review - 4. Apache Kafka Fundamentals | Confluent Fundamentals for Apache Kafka®
  • Review - Apache Kafka in 6 minutes
  • Review - Apache Kafka Explained (Comprehensive Overview)
  • Review - 2. Motivations and Customer Use Cases | Apache Kafka Fundamentals

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka)
Data Integration
48 48%
52% 52
Stream Processing
39 39%
61% 61
Web Service Automation
59 59%
41% 41
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka

RabbitMQ Reviews

Best message queue for cloud-native apps
RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker software that allows applications to communicate with each other using a messaging protocol. It was developed by Rabbit Technologies and first released in 2007, which was later acquired by VMware.RabbitMQ is based on the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and provides a reliable, scalable, and interoperable messaging system.
Source: docs.vanus.ai
Are Free, Open-Source Message Queues Right For You?
However, it's important to note that every tool has its strengths and use cases. For instance, Kafka's strength lies in real-time data streaming, NATS shines with its simplicity, and RabbitMQ provides support for complex routing. In contrast, IronMQ provides an excellent balance of simplicity, durability, scalability, and ease of management, making it a powerful choice for...
Source: blog.iron.io
NATS vs RabbitMQ vs NSQ vs Kafka | Gcore
RabbitMQ follows a standard store-and-forward pattern, allowing messages to be stored in RAM, on disk, or both. To ensure the persistence of messages, the producer can tag them as persistent, and they will be stored in a separate queue. This helps achieve message retention even after a restart or failure of the RabbitMQ server.
Source: gcore.com
6 Best Kafka Alternatives: 2022’s Must-know List
Due to RabbitMQ’s lightweight design, it can be easily deployed on public and private clouds. RabbitMQ is backed not only by a robust support system but also offers a great developer community. Since it is open-source software it is one of the best Kafka Alternatives and RabbitMQ is free of cost.
Source: hevodata.com
Top 15 Alternatives to RabbitMQ In 2021
In this article, we will discuss an overview on RabbitMQ Alternatives. RabbitMQ has a flexible messaging system and functions as a multipurpose broker. But it often stops working, because of its high latency and very slow while doing so. The deployment & management of RabbitMQ is a too dull procedure. It can not be installed as modules, it can be installed only on machines...
Source: gokicker.com

Apache Kafka Reviews

Best ETL Tools: A Curated List
Debezium is an open-source Change Data Capture (CDC) tool that originated from RedHat. It leverages Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect to enable real-time data replication from databases. Debezium was partly inspired by Martin Kleppmann’s "Turning the Database Inside Out" concept, which emphasized the power of the CDC for modern data pipelines.
Source: estuary.dev
Best message queue for cloud-native apps
If you take the time to sort out the history of message queues, you will find a very interesting phenomenon. Most of the currently popular message queues were born around 2010. For example, Apache Kafka was born at LinkedIn in 2010, Derek Collison developed Nats in 2010, and Apache Pulsar was born at Yahoo in 2012. What is the reason for this?
Source: docs.vanus.ai
Are Free, Open-Source Message Queues Right For You?
Apache Kafka is a highly scalable and robust messaging queue system designed by LinkedIn and donated to the Apache Software Foundation. It's ideal for real-time data streaming and processing, providing high throughput for publishing and subscribing to records or messages. Kafka is typically used in scenarios that require real-time analytics and monitoring, IoT applications,...
Source: blog.iron.io
10 Best Open Source ETL Tools for Data Integration
It is difficult to anticipate the exact demand for open-source tools in 2023 because it depends on various factors and emerging trends. However, open-source solutions such as Kubernetes for container orchestration, TensorFlow for machine learning, Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming, and Prometheus for monitoring and observability are expected to grow in prominence in...
Source: testsigma.com
11 Best FREE Open-Source ETL Tools in 2024
Apache Kafka is an Open-Source Data Streaming Tool written in Scala and Java. It publishes and subscribes to a stream of records in a fault-tolerant manner and provides a unified, high-throughput, and low-latency platform to manage data.
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Kafka seems to be a lot more popular than RabbitMQ. While we know about 142 links to Apache Kafka, we've tracked only 1 mention of RabbitMQ. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

RabbitMQ mentions (1)

Apache Kafka mentions (142)

View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka, you can also consider the following products

Apache ActiveMQ - Apache ActiveMQ is an open source messaging and integration patterns server.

IBM MQ - IBM MQ is messaging middleware that simplifies and accelerates the integration of diverse applications and data across multiple platforms.

StatCounter - StatCounter is a simple but powerful real-time web analytics service that helps you track, analyse and understand your visitors so you can make good decisions to become more successful online.

MQTT.fx - MQTT.fx is a MQTT Client written in Java based on Eclipse Paho.

Histats - Start tracking your visitors in 1 minute!

MQTT Explorer - An all-round MQTT client that provides a structured topic overview