StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Background Jobs
  4. Message Queue
  5. Kestrel vs RabbitMQ

Kestrel vs RabbitMQ

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ
Stacks21.8K
Followers18.9K
Votes558
GitHub Stars13.2K
Forks4.0K
Kestrel
Kestrel
Stacks37
Followers58
Votes0

Kestrel vs RabbitMQ: What are the differences?

Kestrel and RabbitMQ are both widely used technologies in the field of message queuing and communication. However, there are several key differences between the two that set them apart in terms of features and functionality.
  1. Protocol Support: Kestrel is primarily designed for .NET applications and supports HTTP as its main protocol. On the other hand, RabbitMQ is a message broker that supports multiple messaging protocols such as AMQP, MQTT, and STOMP. This makes RabbitMQ more versatile and suitable for a variety of use cases.

  2. Message Persistence: Kestrel is an in-memory message queue that does not provide built-in persistence. It stores messages in memory, which means that if the server restarts or crashes, the messages will be lost. In contrast, RabbitMQ supports message persistence by storing messages on disk, ensuring that they are not lost even in case of server failures.

  3. Routing and Messaging Patterns: Kestrel mainly focuses on request/response messaging patterns and provides a simple way to handle incoming HTTP requests. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, supports various routing and messaging patterns such as direct exchange, topic exchange, fanout exchange, and headers exchange. This makes RabbitMQ more flexible and capable of handling complex messaging scenarios.

  4. Scalability and High Availability: Kestrel is designed to be a lightweight and low-overhead server, making it suitable for small to medium-scale applications. However, it may not be the best choice for highly scalable and high-availability systems. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, provides built-in support for clustering and replication, making it more suitable for large-scale deployments that require scalability and high availability.

  5. Message Acknowledgement: Kestrel does not provide built-in support for message acknowledgment, which means that once a message is sent, it is considered delivered and removed from the queue. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, supports explicit message acknowledgment, where consumers can acknowledge the successful processing of a message or reject it if there was an error.

  6. Message Queuing Mechanism: Kestrel uses a lightweight and asynchronous event-driven architecture, making it efficient for handling a large number of concurrent connections. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, uses a traditional queue-based mechanism for message storage and retrieval, which may introduce some level of latency but provides more control over message processing and distribution.

In Summary, Kestrel is a lightweight, in-memory message queue with HTTP support, while RabbitMQ is a versatile message broker with support for multiple protocols, persistence, routing patterns, scalability, and high availability.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on RabbitMQ, Kestrel

viradiya
viradiya

Apr 12, 2020

Needs adviceonAngularJSAngularJSASP.NET CoreASP.NET CoreMSSQLMSSQL

We are going to develop a microservices-based application. It consists of AngularJS, ASP.NET Core, and MSSQL.

We have 3 types of microservices. Emailservice, Filemanagementservice, Filevalidationservice

I am a beginner in microservices. But I have read about RabbitMQ, but come to know that there are Redis and Kafka also in the market. So, I want to know which is best.

933k views933k
Comments
Pulkit
Pulkit

Software Engineer

Oct 30, 2020

Needs adviceonDjangoDjangoAmazon SQSAmazon SQSRabbitMQRabbitMQ

Hi! I am creating a scraping system in Django, which involves long running tasks between 1 minute & 1 Day. As I am new to Message Brokers and Task Queues, I need advice on which architecture to use for my system. ( Amazon SQS, RabbitMQ, or Celery). The system should be autoscalable using Kubernetes(K8) based on the number of pending tasks in the queue.

474k views474k
Comments
Kirill
Kirill

GO/C developer at Duckling Sales

Feb 16, 2021

Decided

Maybe not an obvious comparison with Kafka, since Kafka is pretty different from rabbitmq. But for small service, Rabbit as a pubsub platform is super easy to use and pretty powerful. Kafka as an alternative was the original choice, but its really a kind of overkill for a small-medium service. Especially if you are not planning to use k8s, since pure docker deployment can be a pain because of networking setup. Google PubSub was another alternative, its actually pretty cheap, but I never tested it since Rabbit was matching really good for mailing/notification services.

266k views266k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ
Kestrel
Kestrel

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Kestrel is based on Blaine Cook's "starling" simple, distributed message queue, with added features and bulletproofing, as well as the scalability offered by actors and the JVM.

Robust messaging for applications;Easy to use;Runs on all major operating systems;Supports a huge number of developer platforms;Open source and commercially supported
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
Statistics
GitHub Stars
13.2K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
4.0K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
21.8K
Stacks
37
Followers
18.9K
Followers
58
Votes
558
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 235
    It's fast and it works with good metrics/monitoring
  • 80
    Ease of configuration
  • 60
    I like the admin interface
  • 52
    Easy to set-up and start with
  • 22
    Durable
Cons
  • 9
    Too complicated cluster/HA config and management
  • 6
    Needs Erlang runtime. Need ops good with Erlang runtime
  • 5
    Configuration must be done first, not by your code
  • 4
    Slow
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to RabbitMQ, Kestrel?

Kafka

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

Celery

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

NSQ

NSQ

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

ActiveMQ

ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ

The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.

Apache NiFi

Apache NiFi

An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic.

Gearman

Gearman

Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events.

Memphis

Memphis

Highly scalable and effortless data streaming platform. Made to enable developers and data teams to collaborate and build real-time and streaming apps fast.

IronMQ

IronMQ

An easy-to-use highly available message queuing service. Built for distributed cloud applications with critical messaging needs. Provides on-demand message queuing with advanced features and cloud-optimized performance.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase