Kafka vs RabbitMQ: What’s Your Experience with Choosing Between the Two?

From my experience, it really depends on how you want to handle your data. We chose RabbitMQ for its simplicity and reliable message handling when we first started. However, as we scaled, we hit limitations with things like event replay and high throughput. We eventually switched to Kafka because of its immutable message storage and how consumers manage their offsets, which gave us a lot more flexibility. It allowed us to add new consumers and reprocess data without starting over, which was a game changer for us. Plus, Kafka just handles scale better—it seems to keep going, even with large backlogs.

If you're doing queue processing, RabbitMQ is great. But for event streaming or a pub/sub setup, Kafka shines. It allows you to scale publishers or consumers massively, which is ideal for IoT applications where you can’t predict the number of consumers. Just know that Kafka can be a bit tricky to manage, but it’s worth it for the performance.

They actually serve different purposes, so it's not just a matter of one being better than the other. Both can work together in some architectures. For smaller projects, I’d stick with RabbitMQ, but I’d recommend Kafka if you’re looking for long-term scalability and you’re dealing with higher traffic. Just keep your infrastructure in mind and pick what fits your team’s skills.

I work with both—RabbitMQ for new projects due to its ease of use and great UI, and Kafka for larger systems because it’s super robust and can handle massive loads. Sure, Kafka requires more setup and learning, but it scales really well. If you need to replay messages or plan to process a lot of traffic, Kafka is the way to go. Otherwise, for simpler tasks or when you need a more straightforward approach, RabbitMQ is a solid choice.

Kafka has been fantastic for me, especially when handling real-time data. I’ve managed to deal with a significant volume of requests without any performance issues on a simple instance. You may want to think about future growth, though. Getting your architecture right from the start saves you the headache of redesigning later. RabbitMQ has its uses, especially with the new stream supports, but for now, I’d lean towards Kafka if you anticipate growth.