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RabbitMQ vs Sidekiq: What are the differences?

Introduction

RabbitMQ and Sidekiq are both popular messaging and background job processing systems used in web development. They have some key differences that set them apart from each other. In this article, we will explore the six main differences between RabbitMQ and Sidekiq.

  1. Workload Management: RabbitMQ focuses on distributing workload across multiple consumers. It uses a messaging queue where producers publish messages, and consumers receive and process them. This enables load balancing and scaling of workload efficiently. On the other hand, Sidekiq is a background job processing library for Ruby, which prioritizes the reliable execution of jobs in a threaded manner.

  2. Message Handling: RabbitMQ uses the AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) to handle messages. It offers advanced features like guaranteed message delivery, publish/subscribe pattern, and flexible exchange types. Sidekiq, on the other hand, uses Redis as its message broker and handles messages using Redis' pub/sub mechanism.

  3. Supported Languages/Frameworks: RabbitMQ is implemented in Erlang and supports a wide range of languages including Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, and more. It also provides client libraries for popular frameworks like Spring, Django, and Ruby on Rails. Sidekiq is specifically designed for Ruby applications and integrates seamlessly with Ruby on Rails and other frameworks using Active Job.

  4. Concurrency: RabbitMQ handles concurrency at the consumer level, allowing multiple consumers to process messages simultaneously. This enables high throughput and efficient resource utilization. Sidekiq, on the other hand, handles concurrency at the worker level, where each worker processes one job at a time. It relies on multi-threading and can scale horizontally by running multiple Sidekiq processes.

  5. Monitoring and Management: RabbitMQ provides a web-based management tool called the RabbitMQ Management Plugin. It allows administrators to monitor and manage message queues, exchanges, and consumers, and provides real-time metrics and stats. Sidekiq, on the other hand, provides a web interface called Sidekiq Web, which allows monitoring of workers, job queues, and provides access to various control features.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: RabbitMQ has a large and active community with comprehensive documentation and a wide range of plugins and integrations available. It is a mature and battle-tested messaging system used by many organizations. Sidekiq also has a strong community and is widely used in the Ruby ecosystem. It benefits from the Ruby community's extensive libraries and gems, making it easier to integrate with other Ruby applications.

In summary, RabbitMQ focuses on workload distribution and provides advanced messaging features while Sidekiq prioritizes reliable job execution within Ruby applications. RabbitMQ supports multiple languages and provides in-depth monitoring and management capabilities, while Sidekiq is specifically designed for Ruby and has a strong community and ecosystem support.

Advice on RabbitMQ and Sidekiq
Pulkit Sapra
Needs advice
on
Amazon SQSAmazon SQSKubernetesKubernetes
and
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

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.

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Replies (1)
Anis Zehani
Recommends
on
KafkaKafka

Hello, i highly recommend Apache Kafka, to me it's the best. You can deploy it in cluster mode inside K8S, thus you can have a Highly available system (also auto scalable).

Good luck

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Needs advice
on
CeleryCelery
and
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

I am just a beginner at these two technologies.

Problem statement: I am getting lakh of users from the sequel server for whom I need to create caches in MongoDB by making different REST API requests.

Here these users can be treated as messages. Each REST API request is a task.

I am confused about whether I should go for RabbitMQ alone or Celery.

If I have to go with RabbitMQ, I prefer to use python with Pika module. But the challenge with Pika is, it is not thread-safe. So I am not finding a way to execute a lakh of API requests in parallel using multiple threads using Pika.

If I have to go with Celery, I don't know how I can achieve better scalability in executing these API requests in parallel.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
rqrqRedisRedis

For large amounts of small tasks and caches I have had good luck with Redis and RQ. I have not personally used celery but I am fairly sure it would scale well, and I have not used RabbitMQ for anything besides communication between services. If you prefer python my suggestions should feel comfortable.

Sorry I do not have a more information

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Meili Triantafyllidi
Software engineer at Digital Science · | 6 upvotes · 470.9K views
Needs advice
on
Amazon SQSAmazon SQSRabbitMQRabbitMQ
and
ZeroMQZeroMQ

Hi, we are in a ZMQ set up in a push/pull pattern, and we currently start to have more traffic and cases that the service is unavailable or stuck. We want to: * Not loose messages in services outages * Safely restart service without losing messages (ZeroMQ seems to need to close the socket in the receiver before restart manually)

Do you have experience with this setup with ZeroMQ? Would you suggest RabbitMQ or Amazon SQS (we are in AWS setup) instead? Something else?

Thank you for your time

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Replies (2)
Shishir Pandey
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

ZeroMQ is fast but you need to build build reliability yourself. There are a number of patterns described in the zeromq guide. I have used RabbitMQ before which gives lot of functionality out of the box, you can probably use the worker queues example from the tutorial, it can also persists messages in the queue.

I haven't used Amazon SQS before. Another tool you could use is Kafka.

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Kevin Deyne
Principal Software Engineer at Accurate Background · | 5 upvotes · 213K views
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

Both would do the trick, but there are some nuances. We work with both.

From the sound of it, your main focus is "not losing messages". In that case, I would go with RabbitMQ with a high availability policy (ha-mode=all) and a main/retry/error queue pattern.

Push messages to an exchange, which sends them to the main queue. If an error occurs, push the errored out message to the retry exchange, which forwards it to the retry queue. Give the retry queue a x-message-ttl and set the main exchange as a dead-letter-exchange. If your message has been retried several times, push it to the error exchange, where the message can remain until someone has time to look at it.

This is a very useful and resilient pattern that allows you to never lose messages. With the high availability policy, you make sure that if one of your rabbitmq nodes dies, another can take over and messages are already mirrored to it.

This is not really possible with SQS, because SQS is a lot more focused on throughput and scaling. Combined with SNS it can do interesting things like deduplication of messages and such. That said, one thing core to its design is that messages have a maximum retention time. The idea is that a message that has stayed in an SQS queue for a while serves no more purpose after a while, so it gets removed - so as to not block up any listener resources for a long time. You can also set up a DLQ here, but these similarly do not hold onto messages forever. Since you seem to depend on messages surviving at all cost, I would suggest that the scaling/throughput benefit of SQS does not outweigh the difference in approach to messages there.

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André Almeida
Technology Manager at GS1 Portugal - Codipor · | 5 upvotes · 434.6K views
Needs advice
on
Azure Service BusAzure Service Bus
and
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

Hello dear developers, our company is starting a new project for a new Web App, and we are currently designing the Architecture (we will be using .NET Core). We want to embark on something new, so we are thinking about migrating from a monolithic perspective to a microservices perspective. We wish to containerize those microservices and make them independent from each other. Is it the best way for microservices to communicate with each other via ESB, or is there a new way of doing this? Maybe complementing with an API Gateway? Can you recommend something else different than the two tools I provided?

We want something good for Cost/Benefit; performance should be high too (but not the primary constraint).

Thank you very much in advance :)

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Replies (2)

A Pro of Azure Service Bus is reliability and persistence: you can send message when receiver is offline; receiver can read it when it back online. A Cons is costs and message size. You can consider also SignalR

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Recommends

There are many different messaging frameworks available for IPC use. It's not really a question of how "new" the technology is, but what you need it to do. Azure Service Bus can be a great service to use, but it can also take a lot of effort to administrate and maintain that can make it costly to use unless you need the more advanced features it offers for routing, sequencing, delivery, etc. I would recommend checking out this link to get a basic idea of different messaging architectures. These only cover Azure services, but there are many other solutions that use similar architectural models.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-grid/compare-messaging-services

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Needs advice
on
KafkaKafkaRabbitMQRabbitMQ
and
RedisRedis

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.

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Replies (4)
Maheedhar Aluri
Recommends
on
KafkaKafka

Kafka is an Enterprise Messaging Framework whereas Redis is an Enterprise Cache Broker, in-memory database and high performance database.Both are having their own advantages, but they are different in usage and implementation. Now if you are creating microservices check the user consumption volumes, its generating logs, scalability, systems to be integrated and so on. I feel for your scenario initially you can go with KAFKA bu as the throughput, consumption and other factors are scaling then gradually you can add Redis accordingly.

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Recommends
on
AngularAngular

I first recommend that you choose Angular over AngularJS if you are starting something new. AngularJs is no longer getting enhancements, but perhaps you meant Angular. Regarding microservices, I recommend considering microservices when you have different development teams for each service that may want to use different programming languages and backend data stores. If it is all the same team, same code language, and same data store I would not use microservices. I might use a message queue, in which case RabbitMQ is a good one. But you may also be able to simply write your own in which you write a record in a table in MSSQL and one of your services reads the record from the table and processes it. The most challenging part of doing it yourself is writing a service that does a good job of reading the queue without reading the same message multiple times or missing a message; and that is where RabbitMQ can help.

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Amit Mor
Software Architect at Payoneer · | 3 upvotes · 807.1K views
Recommends
on
KafkaKafka

I think something is missing here and you should consider answering it to yourself. You are building a couple of services. Why are you considering event-sourcing architecture using Message Brokers such as the above? Won't a simple REST service based arch suffice? Read about CQRS and the problems it entails (state vs command impedance for example). Do you need Pub/Sub or Push/Pull? Is queuing of messages enough or would you need querying or filtering of messages before consumption? Also, someone would have to manage these brokers (unless using managed, cloud provider based solution), automate their deployment, someone would need to take care of backups, clustering if needed, disaster recovery, etc. I have a good past experience in terms of manageability/devops of the above options with Kafka and Redis, not so much with RabbitMQ. Both are very performant. But also note that Redis is not a pure message broker (at time of writing) but more of a general purpose in-memory key-value store. Kafka nowadays is much more than a distributed message broker. Long story short. In my taste, you should go with a minialistic approach and try to avoid either of them if you can, especially if your architecture does not fall nicely into event sourcing. If not I'd examine Kafka. If you need more capabilities than I'd consider Redis and use it for all sorts of other things such as a cache.

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Recommends
on
NATSNATS

We found that the CNCF landscape is a good advisor when working going into the cloud / microservices space: https://landscape.cncf.io/fullscreen=yes. When choosing a technology one important criteria to me is if it is cloud native or not. Neither Redis, RabbitMQ nor Kafka is cloud native. The try to adapt but will be replaced eventually with technologies that are cloud native.

We have gone with NATS and have never looked back. We haven't spend a single minute on server maintainance in the last year and the setup of a cluster is way too easy. With the new features NATS incorporates now (and the ones still on the roadmap) it is already and will be sooo much mure than Redis, RabbitMQ and Kafka are. It can replace service discovery, load balancing, global multiclusters and failover, etc, etc.

Your thought might be: But I don't need all of that! Well, at the same time it is much more leightweight than Redis, RabbitMQ and especially Kafka.

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Needs advice
on
KafkaKafka
and
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

Our backend application is sending some external messages to a third party application at the end of each backend (CRUD) API call (from UI) and these external messages take too much extra time (message building, processing, then sent to the third party and log success/failure), UI application has no concern to these extra third party messages.

So currently we are sending these third party messages by creating a new child thread at end of each REST API call so UI application doesn't wait for these extra third party API calls.

I want to integrate Apache Kafka for these extra third party API calls, so I can also retry on failover third party API calls in a queue(currently third party messages are sending from multiple threads at the same time which uses too much processing and resources) and logging, etc.

Question 1: Is this a use case of a message broker?

Question 2: If it is then Kafka vs RabitMQ which is the better?

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Replies (4)
Tarun Batra
Senior Software Developer at Okta · | 7 upvotes · 757K views
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

RabbitMQ is great for queuing and retrying. You can send the requests to your backend which will further queue these requests in RabbitMQ (or Kafka, too). The consumer on the other end can take care of processing . For a detailed analysis, check this blog about choosing between Kafka and RabbitMQ.

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Trevor Rydalch
Software Engineer at InsideSales.com · | 6 upvotes · 756.8K views
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

Well, first off, it's good practice to do as little non-UI work on the foreground thread as possible, regardless of whether the requests take a long time. You don't want the UI thread blocked.

This sounds like a good use case for RabbitMQ. Primarily because you don't need each message processed by more than one consumer. If you wanted to process a single message more than once (say for different purposes), then Apache Kafka would be a much better fit as you can have multiple consumer groups consuming from the same topics independently.

Have your API publish messages containing the data necessary for the third-party request to a Rabbit queue and have consumers reading off there. If it fails, you can either retry immediately, or publish to a deadletter queue where you can reprocess them whenever you want (shovel them back into the regular queue).

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Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

In my opinion RabbitMQ fits better in your case because you don’t have order in queue. You can process your messages in any order. You don’t need to store the data what you sent. Kafka is a persistent storage like the blockchain. RabbitMQ is a message broker. Kafka is not a good solution for the system with confirmations of the messages delivery.

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Guillaume Maka
Full Stack Web Developer · | 2 upvotes · 756K views
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

As far as I understand, Kafka is a like a persisted event state manager where you can plugin various source of data and transform/query them as event via a stream API. Regarding your use case I will consider using RabbitMQ if your intent is to implement service inter-communication kind of thing. RabbitMQ is a good choice for one-one publisher/subscriber (or consumer) and I think you can also have multiple consumers by configuring a fanout exchange. RabbitMQ provide also message retries, message cancellation, durable queue, message requeue, message ACK....

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Needs advice
on
KafkaKafkaRabbitMQRabbitMQ
and
RedisRedis

Hello! [Client sends live video frames -> Server computes and responds the result] Web clients send video frames from their webcam then on the back we need to run them through some algorithm and send the result back as a response. Since everything will need to work in a live mode, we want something fast and also suitable for our case (as everyone needs). Currently, we are considering RabbitMQ for the purpose, but recently I have noticed that there is Redis and Kafka too. Could you please help us choose among them or anything more suitable beyond these guys. I think something similar to our product would be people using their webcam to get Snapchat masks on their faces, and the calculated face points are responded on from the server, then the client-side draw the mask on the user's face. I hope this helps. Thank you!

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Replies (3)
Jordi Martínez
Senior software architect at Bootloader · | 3 upvotes · 706.1K views
Recommends
on
KafkaKafka

For your use case, the tool that fits more is definitely Kafka. RabbitMQ was not invented to handle data streams, but messages. Plenty of them, of course, but individual messages. Redis is an in-memory database, which is what makes it so fast. Redis recently included features to handle data stream, but it cannot best Kafka on this, or at least not yet. Kafka is not also super fast, it also provides lots of features to help create software to handle those streams.

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Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

I've used all of them and Kafka is hard to set up and maintain. Mostly is a Java dinosaur that you can set up and. I've used it with Storm but that is another big dinosaur. Redis is mostly for caching. The queue mechanism is not very scalable for multiple processors. Depending on the speed you need to implement on the reliability I would use RabbitMQ. You can store the frames(if they are too big) somewhere else and just have a link to them. Moving data through any of these will increase cost of transportation. With Rabbit, you can always have multiple consumers and check for redundancy. Hope it clears out your thoughts!

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Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

For this kind of use case I would recommend either RabbitMQ or Kafka depending on the needs for scaling, redundancy and how you want to design it.

Kafka's true value comes into play when you need to distribute the streaming load over lot's of resources. If you were passing the video frames directly into the queue then you'd probably want to go with Kafka however if you can just pass a pointer to the frames then RabbitMQ should be fine and will be much simpler to run.

Bear in mind too that Kafka is a persistent log, not just a message bus so any data you feed into it is kept available until it expires (which is configurable). This can be useful if you have multiple clients reading from the queue with their own lifecycle but in your case it doesn't sound like that would be necessary. You could also use a RabbitMQ fanout exchange if you need that in the future.

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Decisions about RabbitMQ and Sidekiq
Mickael Alliel
DevOps Engineer at Rookout · | 4 upvotes · 450.1K views

In addition to being a lot cheaper, Google Cloud Pub/Sub allowed us to not worry about maintaining any more infrastructure that needed.

We moved from a self-hosted RabbitMQ over to CloudAMQP and decided that since we use GCP anyway, why not try their managed PubSub?

It is one of the better decisions that we made, and we can just focus about building more important stuff!

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Pros of RabbitMQ
Pros of Sidekiq
  • 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
  • 19
    Standard protocols
  • 19
    Intuitive work through python
  • 11
    Written primarily in Erlang
  • 9
    Simply superb
  • 7
    Completeness of messaging patterns
  • 4
    Reliable
  • 4
    Scales to 1 million messages per second
  • 3
    Better than most traditional queue based message broker
  • 3
    Distributed
  • 3
    Supports MQTT
  • 3
    Supports AMQP
  • 2
    Clear documentation with different scripting language
  • 2
    Better routing system
  • 2
    Inubit Integration
  • 2
    Great ui
  • 2
    High performance
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 2
    Open-source
  • 2
    Runs on Open Telecom Platform
  • 2
    Clusterable
  • 2
    Delayed messages
  • 1
    Supports Streams
  • 1
    Supports STOMP
  • 1
    Supports JMS
  • 124
    Simple
  • 99
    Efficient background processing
  • 60
    Scalability
  • 37
    Better then resque
  • 26
    Great documentation
  • 15
    Admin tool
  • 14
    Great community
  • 8
    Integrates with redis automatically, with zero config
  • 7
    Stupidly simple to integrate and run on Rails/Heroku
  • 7
    Great support
  • 3
    Ruby
  • 3
    Freeium
  • 2
    Pro version
  • 1
    Dashboard w/live polling
  • 1
    Great ecosystem of addons
  • 1
    Fast

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Cons of RabbitMQ
Cons of Sidekiq
  • 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
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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is RabbitMQ?

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

    What is Sidekiq?

    Sidekiq uses threads to handle many jobs at the same time in the same process. It does not require Rails but will integrate tightly with Rails 3/4 to make background processing dead simple.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use RabbitMQ?
    What companies use Sidekiq?
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    Blog Posts

    Jun 6 2019 at 5:11PM

    AppSignal

    RedisRubyKafka+9
    15
    1687
    GitHubPythonNode.js+47
    55
    72670
    GitGitHubDocker+34
    29
    42635
    JavaScriptGitHubPython+42
    53
    22085
    GitHubPythonSlack+25
    7
    3206
    What are some alternatives to RabbitMQ and Sidekiq?
    Kafka
    Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.
    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
    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.
    Amazon SNS
    Amazon Simple Notification Service makes it simple and cost-effective to push to mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire, and internet connected smart devices, as well as pushing to other distributed services. Besides pushing cloud notifications directly to mobile devices, SNS can also deliver notifications by SMS text message or email, to Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, or to any HTTP endpoint.
    Redis
    Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
    See all alternatives