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RabbitMQ

rabbitmq.com

Free plan Open source WebWindowsmacOSLinuxAPISelf-hosted
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Spec score 8.4 #8 of 39 in Message Broker Software

What it is

RabbitMQ is an open source messaging and streaming broker for application communication, including distributed microservices, real-time data, and IoT. Publishers can route messages to one or more consumers using routing, filtering, streaming, and federation. Message acknowledgements and replication across a cluster support delivery reliability, and delivery guarantees are configurable. Supported protocols include AMQP 0-9-1, AMQP 1.0, MQTT, STOMP, RabbitMQ Streams, HTTP, and WebSocket, including browser communication over WebSocket. Client libraries are available for Java, .NET/C#, Erlang, and other languages; the project also offers a community Docker image and Kubernetes operators. RabbitMQ can run in cloud or on-premises environments, on local machines and physical or virtual hardware, and in containers. Linux, Windows, and macOS are supported; z/OS, most mainframes, and systems with less than 100 MB of RAM are not. The free, self-managed Open Source RabbitMQ Server is offered under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 with best-effort community support. VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ is a commercial offering with 24/7 support and enterprise features; pricing is by contact.

Spec sheet

What it does
RabbitMQ is an enterprise-grade messaging and streaming broker for communication among applications, microservices and IoT systems.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Product
RabbitMQ is an open source messaging and streaming broker for application communication, including distributed microservices, real-time data, and IoT.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Deployment
RabbitMQ can run on cloud infrastructure, on-premises, local machines, physical or virtual hardware, containers and IaaS providers.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Integrations
RabbitMQ provides client libraries for Java, .NET/C#, Erlang, and other languages, and offers a community Docker image and Kubernetes operators.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Founded
2007Read 23 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
.NET client
The .NET client is distributed through NuGet, has an online API reference and is developed publicly on GitHub.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Access control
RabbitMQ allows operators to restrict users to specific virtual hosts and limit their permissions within each virtual host.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Built-in integrations
Core plugins include LDAP, OAuth 2.0, HTTP authentication, TLS certificate authentication, federation, MQTT, Prometheus, STOMP, Shovel and WebSockets bridges.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Client guarantees
The maintained AMQP 1.0 libraries provide automatic connection and topology recovery and at-least-once delivery guarantees.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Commercial security
VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ lists FIPS 140-2 compliance for TLS, OAuth 2.0 forward proxy support, and continuous CVE scanning among its enterprise security features.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Commercial support
VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ offers 24/7 support from its core engineering team, and the contact page says highest severity issues receive attention within 30 minutes, 24/7/365.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Community support
The RabbitMQ project provides best-effort community support through GitHub, Discord, a mailing list, and IRC.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Company profile
LinkedIn lists RabbitMQ as a public software-development company founded in 2007, headquartered in London, with 10,001+ employees.Read 15 Oct 2026 · uk.linkedin.com
Current release
The latest listed release is RabbitMQ 4.3.6, released on 16 September 2026.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Delivery reliability
RabbitMQ supports message acknowledgements and message replication across a cluster.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Documentation depth
Versioned documentation is organized for developers and administrators and includes tutorials, configuration, management, monitoring and broker comparisons.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Java client
The Java client is triple-licensed under Apache 2.0, Mozilla Public License 2.0 and GPL 2.0, and its 5.x series requires JDK 8 or newer.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Limit: G2 operations and delivery
G2 reviewers report difficult cluster management, an aging UI, tedious debugging of lost messages, configuration sensitivity and concerns about ordering or message-size limits.Read 15 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Limit: Gartner scale complexity
Gartner reviewers report that clustered setup and maintenance become complex at scale, the UI is dated, and comprehensive observability often requires custom Grafana dashboards.Read 15 Oct 2026 · gartner.com
Limit: TrustRadius administration
TrustRadius reviewers cite Windows clustering quirks, disk-full transaction stoppages, .NET recovery problems, difficult advanced administration and limited historical monitoring.Read 15 Oct 2026 · trustradius.com
Management API
The management plugin supplies an HTTP API, browser UI and rabbitmqadmin command-line tool for administration and monitoring.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Messaging patterns
RabbitMQ supports routing, filtering, streaming, and federation to direct messages from publishers to one or more consumers.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Messaging protocols
RabbitMQ supports open protocols including AMQP 1.0, MQTT 5.0, STOMP and other protocol plugins.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Monitoring limitation
The built-in management UI stores only recent data and has basic visualizations, so the documentation recommends Prometheus and Grafana for long-term monitoring.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Notable news
RabbitMQ 4.3, announced 23 April 2026, added 32 strict quorum-queue priority levels, delayed retries, consumer timeouts, Khepri metadata storage and AMQP 1.0 improvements.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Official client SDKs
RabbitMQ maintains AMQP 1.0 clients for Java, .NET, Go, Python and JavaScript.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Open-source licence
The open-source broker is free under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Original legal entity
Crunchbase identifies Rabbit Technologies as the company behind RabbitMQ, founded by Alexis Richardson, based in London and acquired by Spring.Read 15 Oct 2026 · crunchbase.com
Plugin extensibility
Plugins add protocols, monitoring, federation, exchange types and other broker functions, and third-party plugins can be installed.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Praise: G2 usability and integration
G2 reviewers repeatedly praise the management interface, broad language support, easy integration, reliability and high-throughput asynchronous messaging.Read 15 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Praise: Gartner reliability
Gartner reviewers describe RabbitMQ as stable, mature, easy to install and maintain, reliable for asynchronous workloads and flexible across AMQP, MQTT and STOMP.Read 15 Oct 2026 · gartner.com
Praise: TrustRadius routing and scale
TrustRadius summarizes repeated praise for topic routing, cluster scalability, reliable processing and an easy-to-use web UI.Read 15 Oct 2026 · trustradius.com
Protocols
RabbitMQ supports AMQP 0-9-1, AMQP 1.0, MQTT, STOMP, RabbitMQ Streams, and browser communication over WebSocket.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Quorum queues
Quorum queues persist messages on disk and replicate them across nodes using the Raft consensus algorithm.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Rating on G2
4.1 out of 5 from 46 reviewsRead 15 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Rating on Gartner Peer Insights
4.6 out of 5 from 12 ratingsRead 15 Oct 2026 · gartner.com
Rating on TrustRadius
9.3 out of 10 from 42 reviews and ratingsRead 15 Oct 2026 · trustradius.com
Reliability
Message acknowledgements and replicated queues are provided to protect delivery and data across failures.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Routing
Publishers can route messages to one or many consumers using exchanges, routing keys, filtering and topic-based authorization.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Security advisories
The security page lists 115 advisories, including September 2026 issues affecting STOMP OAuth access, stream API disclosure and MQTT retained messages.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Security controls
RabbitMQ documents authentication, authorization, topic permissions, TLS certificate mechanisms, LDAP and OAuth 2.0 backends.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Streaming
Streaming is a documented RabbitMQ use case alongside service decoupling, RPC and IoT messaging.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Supported operating systems
Supported environments include Linux, Windows, macOS, Solaris and FreeBSD when a compatible Erlang release is available.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
System requirement
RabbitMQ 4.3.6 requires Erlang/OTP 27.0 or newer and supports Erlang 28.x.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Transport security
RabbitMQ has built-in TLS support for client connections, applicable plugins, and encrypted inter-node cluster connections.Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Unsupported systems
The platform documentation excludes z/OS, most mainframes and systems with less than 100 MB of RAM.Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com

Plans and prices

Open-source RabbitMQ Free self-hosted broker · community support Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Open Source RabbitMQ Server Free Free under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 Self-managed broker; support is community-based on a best-effort basis Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com
Tanzu RabbitMQ Priced on request enterprise edition · 24/7 expert support · longer lifecycle · disaster recovery · compliance Read 15 Oct 2026 · rabbitmq.com
VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ Priced on request Contact for commercial offering 24/7 expert support · extended support lifecycle · enterprise features Read 29 Sep 2026 · rabbitmq.com

Every RabbitMQ plan and price →

Strong points and limits

Strong points

  • Supports six named messaging protocols plus HTTP.
  • Runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS.
  • Includes configurable delivery guarantees and dead-letter queues.
  • TLS supports client and inter-node connections.

Limits

  • Self-managed free plan has best-effort community support.
  • Systems with less than 100 MB of RAM are unsupported.
  • Maximum message size is 16 MB.
  • Commercial offering has no listed price.

Who it suits

RabbitMQ suits teams building application messaging or streaming systems that need deployment across cloud, on-premises, or container environments. The free server is self-managed and relies on community support; commercial support is available through VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ.

Verdict

RabbitMQ specifies protocols, deployment options, reliability controls, and operating system support for its self-managed server.

Where Specifiction places it

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