Message Broker Comparison

Recently I have been given the task to find a new message broker. I was given a large list of vague requirements such as it needs to be fast, persistant, durable, etc. Below is a list that I have put together that describes a few brokers that I have researched. As I started to research more and more, I found that these are just a few of the more popular message brokers out of a very large and growing list. I you have experiance with any of these queues, or any other queues that are not mentioned here, feel free to share your thoughts.

1. RabbitMQ (AMQP)
   • Pros:
     1. Can setup retry logic using spring’s retry template
     2. Supports dynamic queue creation.
     3. JSON API to retrieve list and manage queues
     4. Web UI for queue management
     5. Very fast (10x ActiveMQ)
     6. Spring supported through Spring-AMQP package
     7. Large community support
     8. Can configure broker with exchanges/queues to manage performance and route messages based on content
     9. supports STOMP protocol
   • Cons:
     1. Broker is implemented using Erlang and not Java (impacts setup, config)
     2. AMQP is still new
2. ActiveMQ (JMS)
   • Pros:
     1. Can configure connection factory to handle retry logic (delays/redelivery)
     2. Supports dynamic queue creation.
     3. Web UI for queue management
     4. Can retrieve a list of queues through JMX
     5. Spring supported with Spring-JMS
     6. Large community support
     7. Broker is configurable through XML
   • Cons:
     1. Not as fast as RabbitMQ
     2. Messages must be sent to either queues or topics
     3. Doesn’t appear to be completely stable.
3. Qpid (AMQP)
   • Pros:
     1. Java implementation
     2. Durable queues, persistent messages using Derby DB
     3. Windows .NET SDK
   • Cons:
     1. No queue management UI, must use command line, or JMX
     2. Not completely supported by Spring. Can use Spring-AMQP, but not completely supported. NOTE: could use supported spring rabbit libraries, but would need to be using the same version of AMQP as RabbitMQ
     3. Little community support
     4. AMQP is still new
4. HornetQ (JMS)
   • Pros:
     1. Can be installed as a standalone server or with JBoss
     2. REST api to manage queues
     3. XML configuration
   • Cons:
     1. Recommended to use Java 6, although there are special client jars for Java5 (ran into issues using Java5 library)
5. ZeroMQ (AMQP)
   • Pros:
     1. Very fast
   • Cons:
     1. Queues are not durable
     2. Messages are not persistent
     3. Not really a message broker
6. WMQ (JMS)
   • Pros:
     1. Spring support
     2. Can dynamically create listeners
     3. Desktop UI management
     4. Can view messages in UI
   • Cons:
     1. Does not support dynamic queue creation (out of the box).
     2. Does not support consumer backoff (retry delay)
     3. Unless using version 7 or newer, wmq libraries does not support a way to get a current list of queues. We would need to keep track of the queues ourselves.