Surprised to see not much mention of ActiveMQ in these comments, but it's an obvious alternative choice. The general (simplistic) comparison being: - ActiveMQ

Surprised to see not much mention of ActiveMQ in these comments, but it's an obvious alternative choice. The general (simplistic) comparison being: - ActiveMQ more featureful, robust default settings, better integrated with Java/JMS but slower - RabbitMQ faster, simpler, more "just works" The defaults of ActiveMQ lean more towards robustness (hence often naive benchmarks will tell you it's slow). However in practice it is pretty damn easy to run, you literally can just download the default cross-platform distribution and type `./bin/activemq` and it will start running. We use ActiveMQ + Apache Camel which makes a pretty nice combo to achieve lots of generalised messaging and routing functionality.