ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ or ZeroMQ or [closed]

Question

Edit: My initial answer had a strong focus on AMQP. I decided to rewrite it to offer a wider view on the topic.

These 3 messaging technologies have different approaches on building distributed systems :

RabbitMQ is one of the leading implementation of the AMQP protocol (along with Apache Qpid). Therefore, it implements a broker architecture, meaning that messages are queued on a central node before being sent to clients. This approach makes RabbitMQ very easy to use and deploy, because advanced scenarios like routing, load balancing or persistent message queuing are supported in just a few lines of code. However, it also makes it less scalable and “slower” because the central node adds latency and message envelopes are quite big.

ZeroMq is a very lightweight messaging system specially designed for high throughput/low latency scenarios like the one you can find in the financial world. Zmq supports many advanced messaging scenarios but contrary to RabbitMQ, you’ll have to implement most of them yourself by combining various pieces of the framework (e.g : sockets and devices). Zmq is very flexible but you’ll have to study the 80 pages or so of the guide (which I recommend reading for anybody writing distributed system, even if you don’t use Zmq) before being able to do anything more complicated than sending messages between 2 peers.

ActiveMQ is in the middle ground. Like Zmq, it can be deployed with both broker and P2P topologies. Like RabbitMQ, it’s easier to implement advanced scenarios but usually at the cost of raw performance. It’s the Swiss army knife of messaging :-).

Finally, all 3 products:

• have client apis for the most common languages (C++, Java, .Net, Python, Php, Ruby, …)
• have strong documentation
• are actively supported

Why did you miss Sparrow, Starling, Kestrel, Amazon SQS, Beanstalkd, Kafka, IronMQ ?

Message Queue Servers

Message queue servers are available in various languages, Erlang (RabbitMQ), C (beanstalkd), Ruby (Starling or Sparrow), Scala (Kestrel, Kafka) or Java (ActiveMQ). A short overview can be found here

Sparrow

• written by Alex MacCaw
• Sparrow is a lightweight queue written in Ruby that “speaks memcache”

Starling

• written by Blaine Cook at Twitter
• Starling is a Message Queue Server based on MemCached
• written in Ruby
• stores jobs in memory (message queue)
• documentation: some good tutorials, for example the railscast about starling and workling or this blog post about starling

Kestrel

• written by Robey Pointer
• Starling clone written in Scala (a port of Starling from Ruby to Scala)
• Queues are stored in memory, but logged on disk

RabbitMQ

• RabbitMQ is a Message Queue Server in Erlang
• stores jobs in memory (message queue)

Apache ActiveMQ

• ActiveMQ is an open source message broker in Java

Beanstalkd

• written by Philotic, Inc. to improve the response time of a Facebook application
• in-memory workqueue service mostly written in C
• Docu: http://nubyonrails.com/articles/about-this-blog-beanstalk-messaging-queue

Amazon SQS

• Amazon Simple Queue Service

Kafka

• Written at LinkedIn in Scala
• Used by LinkedIn to offload processing of all page and other views
• Defaults to using persistence, uses OS disk cache for hot data (has higher throughput then any of the above having persistence enabled)
• Supports both on-line as off-line processing

ZMQ

• The socket library that acts as a concurrency framework
• Faster than TCP, for clustered products and supercomputing
• Carries messages across inproc, IPC, TCP, and multicast
• Connect N-to-N via fanout, pubsub, pipeline, request-reply
• Asynch I/O for scalable multicore message-passing apps

EagleMQ

• EagleMQ is an open source, high-performance and lightweight queue manager.
• Written in C
• Stores all data in memory and support persistence.
• It has its own protocol. Supports work with queues, routes and channels.

IronMQ

• IronMQ
• Written in Go
• Fully managed queue service
• Available both as cloud version and on-premise

I hope that this will be helpful for us. source

More information than you would want to know:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Notes

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UPDATE

Just elaborating what Paul added in comment. The page mentioned above is dead after 2010, so read with a pinch of salt. Lot of stuff has been been changed in 3 years.

It really depends on your use-case.

Comparing 0MQ with ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ is not fair. ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ are Messaging Systems wich require installation and administration. They offer featurewise a lot more than ZeroMQ. They have real persistent Queues, Support for transactions etc.

ZeroMQ is a lightweight message orientated socket implementation. It is also suitable for in-process asynchronous programming. It is possible to run a "Enterprise Messaging System" over ZeroMQ, but you would have to implement a lot on your own.

So:

ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Websphere MQ & MSMQ are "Enterprise Message Queues"

ZeroMQ is a message orientated IPC Library.