A few years ago, a colleague of ours wrote an informative post to help readers understand when to use RabbitMQ and when to use Apache Kafka. While the two solutions take very different approaches architecturally and can solve different problems, many people find themselves comparing them for situations where there is overlap. In an increasingly distributed environment, where more and more services need to communicate with each other, RabbitMQ and Kafka have both come to be popular services that facilitate that communication. 

Since we published that original blog post, many changes and developments in RabbitMQ have occurred. So, we thought this would be a great time to revisit how RabbitMQ and Kafka have changed, to check whether their respective strengths have shifted, and see how they fit into today’s use case.