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Version: 5.0

Why choose RocketMQ

Why RocketMQ

During the early stages of RocketMQ's development at Alibaba, we utilized it for a multitude of purposes, including asynchronous communications, search, social networking activity flows, data pipelines, and trade processes. As our trade business grew, we noticed that the messaging cluster was under increasing pressure.

After observing and analyzing the performance of the ActiveMQ IO module, we identified a bottleneck as the number of queues and virtual topics increased. We attempted to address this issue through various methods, such as throttling, circuit breakers, and service downgrades, but none proved satisfactory. We also considered using Kafka, a popular messaging solution, but it did not meet our requirements for low latency and high reliability, as explained below. As a result, we made the decision to develop a new messaging engine capable of handling a wider range of use cases, from traditional pub/sub to high-volume, real-time, zero-error transaction systems.

Since its inception, Apache RocketMQ has been widely adopted by enterprise developers and cloud vendors due to its simple architecture, rich business functionality, and extreme scalability. After more than a decade of extensive scenario polishing, RocketMQ has become the industry standard for financial-grade reliable business messages and is widely used in Internet, big data, mobile Internet, IoT, and other fields.

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The following table shows the comparison between RocketMQ, ActiveMQ and Kafka

RocketMQ vs. ActiveMQ vs. Kafka

Messaging ProductClient SDKProtocol and SpecificationOrdered MessageScheduled MessageBatched MessageBroadCast MessageMessage FilterServer Triggered RedeliveryMessage StorageMessage RetroactiveMessage PriorityHigh Availability and FailoverMessage TrackConfigurationManagement and Operation Tools
ActiveMQJava, .NET, C++ etc.Push model, support OpenWire, STOMP, AMQP, MQTT, JMSExclusive Consumer or Exclusive Queues can ensure orderingSupportedNot SupportedSupportedSupportedNot SupportedSupports very fast persistence using JDBC along with a high performance journal,such as levelDB, kahaDBSupportedSupportedSupported, depending on storage,if using levelDB it requires a ZooKeeper serverNot SupportedThe default configuration is low level, user need to optimize the configuration parametersSupported
KafkaJava, Scala etc.Pull model, support TCPEnsure ordering of messages within a partitionNot SupportedSupported, with async producerNot SupportedSupported, you can use Kafka Streams to filter messagesNot SupportedHigh performance file storageSupported offset indicateNot SupportedSupported, requires a ZooKeeper serverNot SupportedKafka uses key-value pairs format for configuration. These values can be supplied either from a file or programmatically.Supported, use terminal command to expose core metrics
RocketMQJava, C++, GoPull model, support TCP, JMS, OpenMessagingEnsure strict ordering of messages,and can scale out gracefullySupportedSupported, with sync mode to avoid message lossSupportedSupported, property filter expressions based on SQL92SupportedHigh performance and low latency file storageSupported timestamp and offset two indicatesNot SupportedSupported, Master-Slave model, without another kitSupportedWork out of box,user only need to pay attention to a few configurationsSupported, rich web and terminal command to expose core metrics