The author correctly points out that he is comparing apples to oranges. Kafka gives you features that certain systems cannot live without, like on disk persist

The author correctly points out that he is comparing apples to oranges. Kafka gives you features that certain systems cannot live without, like on disk persistence (saved my life couple of times) and topics. Filtering messages on the client side like ZeroMQ does it not an option in many cases, just think about security. I think Kafka has a long way to go before it can be used as a general message queue (many features are not there yet like visibility timeout for example) but if you can manage Zookeeper and have means to work with it (somebody understands it and knows its quirks) it can provide a reliable platform for distributing a large number of messages with low latency and high throughput, just like it does at LinkedIN.