RabbitMQ and Kafka are two very different beasts and are best suited to different needs. Ensure that you have the right tool for your system.

RabbitMQ is a battle-tested message broker which is able to support complex routing scenarios and federated queues. At its core, RabbitMQ is AMQP-based, highly reliable, and broker-centric with its focus on message delivery guarantees. It can reliably broker communication and integration within, and between applications running different languages. This makes it best suited for complex systems handling critical information, albeit at a slower rate (20k+/sec) than Kafka.

In contrast, Kafka does not offer delivery guarantees, federated queues or support for complex routing scenarios. But it makes up for this in its speed (100k+/sec), making it best suited for systems whose applications can do most of the heavy lifting, and whose requirements are performance and horizontal scalability. First introduced in 2011, Kafka’s speed and agility come with their limitations.