Rabbit doesn't have Kafka's ability to massively distribute and scale (it does have a distributed story but from what I hear few explore it). But Rabbit also su

Rabbit doesn't have Kafka's ability to massively distribute and scale (it does have a distributed story but from what I hear few explore it). But Rabbit also supports more complex use cases than Kafka because its messaging protocol (AMQP) is more intelligent. Unless you're a "web-scale"/s company, Rabbit's scale even on one node is likely enough. I've been using Rabbit in production for RPC and pub/sub for the past 5 years (single instance running on a non-dedicated VM, medium traffic) and its been pretty easy to setup and has been pretty reliable in practice. I've always been concerned about losing messages, and I did have to learn to turn on persistence and durability for messages to survive server interruptions, but it was easy enough. Message acknowledgements are also a nice feature, and Rabbit is able to achieve at-least-once messaging semantics.