RabbitMQ vs Kafka vs ActiveMQ: What are the differences?
RabbitMQ, Kafka, and ActiveMQ are all messaging technologies that provide asynchronous communication and decouple processes (detaching the sender and receiver of a message).
They are called message queues, message brokers, or messaging tools. RabbitMQ, Kafka, and ActiveMQ all have the same primary purpose but can do their jobs differently.
- Kafka is a high-throughput distributed messaging system.
- RabbitMQ is an AMQP-based reliable message broker.
- ActiveMQ and Kafka are both Apache products written in Java; RabbitMQ is written in Erlang.
Developers describe ActiveMQ as “A message broker written in Java with a full JMS client.” Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, and has easy-to-use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.
On the other hand, RabbitMQ is detailed as “A messaging broker – an intermediary for messaging.” RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages and your messages a safe place to live until received.
ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ can be categorized as “Message Queue” tools.
“Open source” is the primary reason developers consider ActiveMQ over the competitors, whereas “It’s fast and it works with good metrics/monitoring” was the critical factor in picking RabbitMQ.
For the original discussion and the other reviews, please visit https://stackshare.io/stackups/activemq-vs-kafka-vs-rabbitmq.