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  1. Stackups
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  4. Message Queue
  5. ActiveMQ vs Kafka vs RSMQ

ActiveMQ vs Kafka vs RSMQ

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

ActiveMQ
ActiveMQ
Stacks879
Followers1.3K
Votes77
GitHub Stars2.4K
Forks1.5K
Kafka
Kafka
Stacks24.2K
Followers22.3K
Votes607
GitHub Stars31.2K
Forks14.8K
RSMQ
RSMQ
Stacks4
Followers87
Votes6
GitHub Stars1.8K
Forks120

ActiveMQ vs Kafka vs RSMQ: What are the differences?

# Introduction
This Markdown code provides a comparison between ActiveMQ, Kafka, and RSMQ, summarizing key differences between these messaging systems.

1. **Message Processing Model**: ActiveMQ follows the traditional message queue model, where messages are stored until consumed by subscribers. Kafka, on the other hand, uses a distributed commit log approach where data is stored permanently and replicated across multiple servers, enabling high throughput and low latency. RSMQ utilizes a simple Redis-based message queue system that prioritizes simplicity and speed but may lack the advanced features of ActiveMQ and Kafka.

2. **Scalability**: ActiveMQ can scale vertically by adding more resources to a single broker but can face limitations in horizontal scaling due to potential bottlenecks. Kafka is highly scalable horizontally, allowing users to add more brokers to increase throughput and storage capacity easily. RSMQ provides decent scalability for simpler use cases but may not be as suitable for extremely high-volume applications compared to Kafka.

3. **Use Cases**: ActiveMQ is commonly used for traditional message queuing applications, supporting features like point-to-point and publish-subscribe messaging patterns. Kafka is preferred for use cases requiring high throughput, durability, and fault-tolerance, such as real-time data processing and event streaming. RSMQ is best suited for lightweight applications that prioritize simplicity and performance over advanced functionality and scalability.

4. **Storage Model**: ActiveMQ stores messages in-memory or on disk, providing flexibility in configuring storage options based on performance requirements. Kafka stores messages on disk persistently, ensuring durability and fault tolerance even in the event of failures. RSMQ leverages Redis for message storage, offering high performance through in-memory caching but may have limitations in terms of disk-based persistence and long-term data retention.

5. **Consumer Groups**: ActiveMQ supports consumer groups for load balancing messages across multiple consumers within a queue, ensuring efficient message processing. Kafka introduces the concept of consumer groups along with offset management, enabling parallel processing of messages by multiple consumer instances while maintaining message ordering and fault tolerance. RSMQ does not inherently support consumer groups, which may limit its capabilities for complex message processing scenarios.

6. **Ecosystem Integration**: ActiveMQ has a rich ecosystem with support for various protocols and integrations with popular frameworks and tools in the Java ecosystem. Kafka offers extensive ecosystem integration with connectors for integrating with databases, stream processing frameworks, and monitoring tools, making it a popular choice for building data pipelines. RSMQ, being a simpler message queue system based on Redis, may have limitations in terms of ecosystem integrations and community support compared to ActiveMQ and Kafka.

In Summary, this Markdown code outlined key differences between ActiveMQ, Kafka, and RSMQ, covering aspects like message processing models, scalability, use cases, storage models, consumer groups, and ecosystem integrations.

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Advice on ActiveMQ, Kafka, RSMQ

Tarun
Tarun

Senior Software Developer at Okta

Dec 4, 2021

Review

We have faced the same question some time ago. Before I begin, DO NOT use Redis as a message broker. It is fast and easy to set up in the beginning but it does not scale. It is not made to be reliable in scale and that is mentioned in the official docs. This analysis of our problems with Redis may help you.

We have used Kafka and RabbitMQ both in scale. We concluded that RabbitMQ is a really good general purpose message broker (for our case) and Kafka is really fast but limited in features. That’s the trade off that we understood from using it. In-fact I blogged about the trade offs between Kafka and RabbitMQ to document it. I hope it helps you in choosing the best pub-sub layer for your use case.

153k views153k
Comments
viradiya
viradiya

Apr 12, 2020

Needs adviceonAngularJSAngularJSASP.NET CoreASP.NET CoreMSSQLMSSQL

We are going to develop a microservices-based application. It consists of AngularJS, ASP.NET Core, and MSSQL.

We have 3 types of microservices. Emailservice, Filemanagementservice, Filevalidationservice

I am a beginner in microservices. But I have read about RabbitMQ, but come to know that there are Redis and Kafka also in the market. So, I want to know which is best.

933k views933k
Comments
Kirill
Kirill

GO/C developer at Duckling Sales

Feb 16, 2021

Decided

Maybe not an obvious comparison with Kafka, since Kafka is pretty different from rabbitmq. But for small service, Rabbit as a pubsub platform is super easy to use and pretty powerful. Kafka as an alternative was the original choice, but its really a kind of overkill for a small-medium service. Especially if you are not planning to use k8s, since pure docker deployment can be a pain because of networking setup. Google PubSub was another alternative, its actually pretty cheap, but I never tested it since Rabbit was matching really good for mailing/notification services.

266k views266k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

ActiveMQ
ActiveMQ
Kafka
Kafka
RSMQ
RSMQ

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.

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

tl;dr: If you run a Redis server and currently use Amazon SQS or a similar message queue you might as well use this fast little replacement. Using a shared Redis server multiple Node.js processes can send / receive messages.

Protect your data & Balance your Load; Easy enterprise integration patterns; Flexible deployment
Written at LinkedIn in Scala;Used by LinkedIn to offload processing of all page and other views;Defaults to using persistence, uses OS disk cache for hot data (has higher throughput then any of the above having persistence enabled);Supports both on-line as off-line processing
Lightweight: Just Redis and ~500 lines of javascript.;Guaranteed delivery of a message to exactly one recipient within a messages visibility timeout.;Received messages that are not deleted will reappear after the visibility timeout.;Test coverage;Optional RESTful interface via rest-rsmq
Statistics
GitHub Stars
2.4K
GitHub Stars
31.2K
GitHub Stars
1.8K
GitHub Forks
1.5K
GitHub Forks
14.8K
GitHub Forks
120
Stacks
879
Stacks
24.2K
Stacks
4
Followers
1.3K
Followers
22.3K
Followers
87
Votes
77
Votes
607
Votes
6
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 18
    Easy to use
  • 14
    Open source
  • 13
    Efficient
  • 10
    JMS compliant
  • 6
    High Availability
Cons
  • 1
    ONLY Vertically Scalable
  • 1
    Difficult to scale
  • 1
    Low resilience to exceptions and interruptions
  • 1
    Support
Pros
  • 126
    High-throughput
  • 119
    Distributed
  • 92
    Scalable
  • 86
    High-Performance
  • 66
    Durable
Cons
  • 32
    Non-Java clients are second-class citizens
  • 29
    Needs Zookeeper
  • 9
    Operational difficulties
  • 5
    Terrible Packaging
Pros
  • 2
    Simple, does one thing well
  • 1
    Backed by Redis
  • 1
    Written in Coffeescript
  • 1
    Comes with a visibility timeout feature similar to AWS
  • 1
    Written in TypeScript
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
Redis
Redis

What are some alternatives to ActiveMQ, Kafka, RSMQ?

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.

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.

IronMQ

IronMQ

An easy-to-use highly available message queuing service. Built for distributed cloud applications with critical messaging needs. Provides on-demand message queuing with advanced features and cloud-optimized performance.

Apache Pulsar

Apache Pulsar

Apache Pulsar is a distributed messaging solution developed and released to open source at Yahoo. Pulsar supports both pub-sub messaging and queuing in a platform designed for performance, scalability, and ease of development and operation.

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