Apache Kafka vs Apache RocketMQ
Apache Kafka
kafka.apache.orgApache RocketMQ
rocketmq.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Apache Kafka | Apache RocketMQ |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · Event Streaming Platforms | 7.8 (#12) | 8.9 (#2) |
| Spec score · Distributed Systems | 7.8 (#15) | 8.9 (#4) |
| Spec score · Message Broker Software | 7.8 (#21) | 8.9 (#4) |
| Spec score · Message Queue (MQ) Software | 7.8 (#16) | 8.8 (#4) |
| Deployment | Kafka can run on bare-metal hardware, virtual machines, or containers, on premises or in the cloud, with self-managed or vendor-managed service options. | RocketMQ 5.x separates stateless Proxy from storage and compute so those layers can scale independently. |
| Security | The project describes Kafka as secure; the ASF directs vulnerability reports to its security page. | RocketMQ provides ACL and TLS, but operators must configure ACL or restrict access to trusted networks; the security guide warns that ACL is not enabled by default. |
| Support | The Apache Software Foundation says it does not provide formal or commercial support for its software packages. | The site links to community email groups, GitHub issues, and contribution guidance for help and participation. |
| Use cases | The project lists messaging, website activity tracking, metrics, log aggregation, stream processing, event sourcing, and commit logs as Kafka use cases. | Its asynchronous model is suited to decoupling systems and shifting loads between upstream and downstream services. |
| What it does | Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform for data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. | Apache RocketMQ is a distributed messaging and streaming platform designed for low latency, high throughput, reliability and very large scale. |
Plans
Apache RocketMQ
- Apache RocketMQFree
- Apache RocketMQ open-source distributionFree
In their own words
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event-streaming platform for data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. Applications can publish and subscribe to event streams, retain them durably, and process them either in real time or later. Kafka supports durable, fault-tolerant replication across availability zones, data centers, or geographic regions. Kafka Streams provides stateful operations, aggregations, windowing, joins, event-time processing, and exactly-once processing. Kafka Connect links hundreds of event sources and sinks, including Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, and AWS S3. Deployments can use bare metal, virtual machines, or containers, on premises or in the cloud, with self-managed or vendor-managed options. The project describes network-limited throughput, latency as low as 2 ms, and clusters of up to 1,000 brokers. Kafka is self-hosted, free, and open source under Apache License 2.0. A local quickstart requires Java 17 or later.
Apache RocketMQ
Apache RocketMQ is distributed middleware for asynchronous communication and publish/subscribe messaging. Its asynchronous model can separate systems and shift loads between upstream and downstream services. Messaging options include publish/subscribe, request/reply, streaming, transactional messages, FIFO ordering, filtering, and push or pull consumption. The project lists durable persistence, replication, failover, fault tolerance, high-availability options, and cross-region disaster recovery. Its site describes million-level LiteTopics per cluster and says RocketMQ has demonstrated 10M+ TPS throughput. It can run locally, in Docker, or Kubernetes, with source and binary packages available. The ecosystem includes EventBridge, MQTT, RocketMQ Connect, RocketMQ Streams, Spring, Flink, Prometheus Exporter, and a Kubernetes Operator; AI options include native MCP support, A2A compatibility, and integrations with LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, AgentScope, Dify, and Coze. The project lists gRPC SDKs for Java, Go, Python, C++, and Rust, plus gRPC, MQTT, JMS, and OpenMessaging protocols. It is free under Apache License 2.0. ACL is not enabled by default.