Difference Between ZeroMQ vs RabbitMQ

ZeroMQ is an open-source, high-performance messaging library. It is cross-platform and supports cross languages and is light-weight and fast. ZeroMQ is a service provider of messaging. Using these providers, a messaging API is required to send and receive messages. And need to integrate these providers with the application server. ZeroMQ is especially suited for high performance and low latency scenarios.

RabbitMQ is a traditional message broker with a variety of message protocols being implemented. To implement the Advance Message Queue Protocol (AMQP), RabbitMQ was initially developed. AMQP standardizes messaging with the help of Producers, Broker, and Consumers.

What is ZeroMQ?

ZeroMQ is a socket-oriented, light-weight message implementation. It is an asynchronous messaging library that is used in different applications for messaging systems. It offers a message queue, but a ZeroMQ device will operate without a dedicated message broker, unlike other message-oriented middleware.

Components of ZeroMQ

Sockets: Using sockets, the user communicates with ZeroMQ. The sockets are much like TCP sockets, the difference between them is that each socket is able to handle multiple peer communication.

Worker Thread: Various objects are residing in the worker thread. Every one of these objects is owned by precisely one parent entity (the relationship is denoted in the illustration using a plain line). Many objects are held by sockets directly; nevertheless, there are a few instances where an entity is controlled by a socket-owned object.

Architecture of ZeroMQ

Listener: For every new connection, a TCP listener entity listens to incoming TCP connections and generates an engine/session object.
Session: It is the session object that communicates with the ZeroMQ socket.
Engine: The engine object communicates with the network.
Pipe: While the sessions get messages shared with the sockets. There are two ways of passing messages inside. Pipe object handles each direction of messages to be passed inside. Essentially, each pipe is a switch-free queue designed for fast transmission of messages among threads.

What is RabbitMQ?

It’s a message broker; it accepts and sends messages. It is just similar to post office where mails are received, stored and transmitted to the recipient in the same way RabbitMQ accepts, stores and forwards binary data blobs (messages).

Components of RabbitMQ

Figure 1, demonstrates basic message consumption with the following components as discussed below

Producer: The producer sends a message to the queue but never uses queue directly instead it uses exchange. Publishing a message means that the producer sends a message to exchange and exchange forwards the message to the queue.
Exchange: An exchange is responsible for routing the messages with links and routing keys to various queues. A binding is a connection or link between an exchange and a queue.
Queue: It is a pool where messages are stored.
Consumer: Consuming a message means that the consumer picks up a message from a queue and consumes it.

Head to Head Comparison Between ZeroMQ vs RabbitMQ (Infographics)

Below are the top 7 comparisons between ZeroMQ vs RabbitMQ:

Key Differences of ZeroMQ vs RabbitMQ

The key differences between ZeroMQ vs RabbitMQ are provided and discussed as follows:

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Persistence

ZeroMQ: ZeroMq doesn’t support persistence. It’s more like you can use a toolbox to create a custom messaging system. This means that if another party is offline, you will lose the message because there is nothing to hold or save messages.
RabbitMQ: RabbitMQ promotes broker behavior that is it supports message persistence.

Message Retention

ZeroMQ: It does not support message retention. If no subscribers are mentioned, ZeroMQ would drop messages and the configurable size buffers in memory may fill up even if the subscribers missed out.
RabbitMQ: RabbitMQ sends the message to the consumer and the message is removed from the queue once it has been processed and the acknowledgment has arrived.

Performance

ZeroMQ: ZeroMQ is much faster than RabbitMQ because it doesn’t store messages on the disk so you don’t need to go back and forth to get messages. It stores messages in memory in small buffers.
RabbitMQ: RabbitMQ promotes broker functionality that is it supports message persistence so it is slower.

Throughput

ZeroMQ: With ZeroMq one could get a throughput of up to 10,000 messages per 15 milliseconds that is approximately 66K-70K messages/sec as it needs less hardware, which results in high throughput.
RabbitMQ: RabbitMQ gives a throughput of up to 4K -10K messages/sec

Design

ZeroMQ: ZeroMQ has a first-class definition of the subscription filter. The subscription filter helps you to decide which messages you are interested in receiving depending on the prefix match. The first frame of each message contains the logical name of the stream and the second frame contains the actual log record. Instead, we can configure ZeroMQ to render an exact match on the first frame so we only get the entries we care for.
RabbitMQ: It uses a smart broker / dumb consumer model that focuses on consistently delivering messages to consumers that consume at approximately the same pace as the broker keeps track of consumer status. It has Exchange queue topology, where the producer sends a message to an exchange that is then routed to different queue bindings that consumers can consume.

ZeroMQ vs RabbitMQ Comparison Table

Below is the major comparison between ZeroMQ vs RabbitMQ:

Basis of Comparison	ZeroMQ	RabbitMQ
Origin	Developed by a broad contributor group, which iMatix created.	To implement AMQP(Advanced Messaging Queueing Protocol).
Performance	It is Faster.	Slower when compared to ZeroMQ.
Throughput	66K messages/sec	4K-10K messages/sec
Message Retention	No retention.	Acknowledgment based.
Persistence	ZeroMQ does not support persistence.	Supports persistence.
Design	It has a concept of a Subscription filter.	It has a concept of a queue.
Companies using	Binary.com, Runbook, GraphicWeave, Investing.com, XING.	Reddit, 9GAG, Robinhood, MIT, CircleCI, Sentry.

Conclusion

We’ve seen ZeroMQ vs RabbitMQ in depth so far, we have come to the conclusion that ZeroMQ is not a message broker, but a library used to construct brokers and protocols. Both RabbitMQ and ZeroMQ rely on various messaging aspects.

ZeroMQ concentrates much more on how messages are transmitted over the wire. On the other side, RabbitMQ concentrates on how messages are stored, filtered and monitored. You can get the best of both worlds by combining the two technologies.