Comparing Kafka and RabbitMQ

Kafka is pull-based and provides higher throughput. It is suitable for collecting and delivering large volumes of data, such as collecting and analyzing logs. RabbitMQ does not provide as high throughput as Kafka, but it offers more message queuing functions.

The following is a comparison analysis on the performance, data reliability, service availability, and functions of Kafka and RabbitMQ.

Performance

The performance of message-oriented middleware is measured by throughput. While RabbitMQ provides tens of thousands of QPS, Kafka provides millions.

However, if idempotency and transactions are enabled for Kafka, its performance will be compromised.

Data Reliability

Both Kafka and RabbitMQ provide the replication mechanism to ensure high data reliability.

Service Availability

Kafka runs in clusters and has partitions and replicas. Therefore, failure of a single broker does not affect services and the capacity of Kafka can be linearly scaled up.

Functions

Both Kafka and RabbitMQ are popular open-source message-oriented middleware. They differ mainly in the functions, which are listed in the following table.

**Table 1** Function differences between Kafka and RabbitMQ
Function	Kafka 1.1.0/2.3.0	RabbitMQ 3.7.17
Priority queue	Not supported	Supported. It is recommended that the priority be set to 0–10.
Delayed queue	Not supported	Supported
Dead letter queue	Not supported	Supported
Retry	Not supported	Not supported
Retrieval mode	Pull-based	Pull-based and push-based
Message broadcasting	Supported	Supported
Message tracking	Supports offset and timestamp tracking.	Not supported. Once a message retrieval has been acknowledged, RabbitMQ will be notified that the message can be deleted.
Message accumulation	Supports higher accumulation performance than RabbitMQ thanks to high throughput.	Supported
Persistence	Supported	Supported
Message tracing	Not supported	Supported by the firehose feature or the rabbitmq_tracing plugin. However, rabbitmq_tracing reduces performance and should be used only for troubleshooting.
Message filtering	Supported	Not supported, but can be encapsulated.
Multi-tenancy	Not supported	Supported
Multi-protocol	Only Apache Kafka is supported.	RabbitMQ is based on AMQP and supports MQTT and STOMP.
Multi-language	Kafka is written in Scala and Java and supports clients in multiple programming languages.	RabbitMQ is written in Erlang and supports clients in multiple programming languages.
Throttling	Supports throttling on producer or consumer clients and users.	Supports credit-based throttling on producers, a mechanism that triggers protection from within.
Ordered message delivery	Supports partition-level FIFO.	Supports FIFO only for single-threaded message queuing without advanced features such as delayed queues or priority queues.
Security	Supports SSL and SASL authentication and read/write permissions control.	Similar to Kafka.
Idempotency	Supports idempotency for a single producer session.	Not supported
Transaction messages	Supported	Supported