StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Background Jobs
  4. Message Queue
  5. Azure Service Bus vs MSMQ

Azure Service Bus vs MSMQ

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Azure Service Bus
Azure Service Bus
Stacks553
Followers536
Votes7
MSMQ
MSMQ
Stacks33
Followers118
Votes3

Azure Service Bus vs MSMQ: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between Azure Service Bus and MSMQ, highlighting the key differences between the two messaging services.

  1. Scalability: Azure Service Bus is a cloud-based messaging service that offers higher scalability compared to MSMQ, which is limited to the capabilities and resources of a single machine. With Azure Service Bus, users can handle large numbers of messages and scale their applications as needed.

  2. Message Size: Azure Service Bus allows larger message sizes compared to MSMQ. While MSMQ has a limit of 4 MB per message, Azure Service Bus supports message sizes of up to 1 MB for the Standard tier and 100 MB for the Premium tier.

  3. Protocol Support: Azure Service Bus supports multiple protocols such as AMQP, MQTT, and HTTPS, providing flexibility in communication options. On the other hand, MSMQ primarily uses the TCP/IP protocol for communication, limiting the protocol options available.

  4. Cross-Platform Compatibility: Azure Service Bus is designed to work seamlessly with various platforms and programming languages, including .NET, Java, Node.js, and more. MSMQ, on the other hand, is primarily tailored for Windows-based systems and may not have the same level of compatibility with other platforms.

  5. Message Persistence: In Azure Service Bus, messages are persisted by default, ensuring reliable delivery even if the receiver is not immediately available. MSMQ, by default, only offers in-memory message delivery, which means that messages may be lost if the receiver is not active or the machine is restarted.

  6. Azure Integration: Azure Service Bus is tightly integrated with other Azure services, providing easy integration and seamless communication between different components of cloud-based applications. MSMQ, being a Windows-based messaging service, does not have the same level of integration capabilities with Azure services.

In summary, Azure Service Bus offers greater scalability, supports larger message sizes, provides more protocol options, offers better cross-platform compatibility, ensures message persistence by default, and seamlessly integrates with other Azure services compared to MSMQ.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Azure Service Bus, MSMQ

André
André

Technology Manager at GS1 Portugal - Codipor

Jul 30, 2020

Needs adviceon.NET Core.NET Core

Hello dear developers, our company is starting a new project for a new Web App, and we are currently designing the Architecture (we will be using .NET Core). We want to embark on something new, so we are thinking about migrating from a monolithic perspective to a microservices perspective. We wish to containerize those microservices and make them independent from each other. Is it the best way for microservices to communicate with each other via ESB, or is there a new way of doing this? Maybe complementing with an API Gateway? Can you recommend something else different than the two tools I provided?

We want something good for Cost/Benefit; performance should be high too (but not the primary constraint).

Thank you very much in advance :)

461k views461k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Azure Service Bus
Azure Service Bus
MSMQ
MSMQ

It is a cloud messaging system for connecting apps and devices across public and private clouds. You can depend on it when you need highly-reliable cloud messaging service between applications and services, even when one or more is offline.

This technology enables applications running at different times to communicate across heterogeneous networks and systems that may be temporarily offline. Applications send messages to queues and read messages from queues.

Statistics
Stacks
553
Stacks
33
Followers
536
Followers
118
Votes
7
Votes
3
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 4
    Easy Integration with .Net
  • 2
    Cloud Native
  • 1
    Use while high messaging need
Cons
  • 1
    Skills can only be used in Azure - vendor lock-in
  • 1
    Limited features in Basic tier
  • 1
    Observability of messages in the queue is lacking
  • 1
    Lacking in JMS support
Pros
  • 2
    Easy to learn
  • 1
    Cloud not needed
Cons
  • 1
    Windows dependency

What are some alternatives to Azure Service Bus, MSMQ?

Kafka

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Celery

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

NSQ

NSQ

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

ActiveMQ

ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with 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.

ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ

The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.

Apache NiFi

Apache NiFi

An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic.

Gearman

Gearman

Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events.

Memphis

Memphis

Highly scalable and effortless data streaming platform. Made to enable developers and data teams to collaborate and build real-time and streaming apps fast.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase