Benchmarking Apache Pulsar, Kafka, and RabbitMQ

This article discusses a comprehensive performance test comparing Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Pulsar on the latest cloud hardware. The results show that Kafka delivers the best throughput while providing the lowest end-to-end latencies up to the p99.9th percentile. At lower throughputs, RabbitMQ delivers messages with significantly lower latency than Kafka and Pulsar but only when lightly loaded. The cost tends to be an inverse function of performance, making Kafka the most efficient system in terms of value per byte written due to its efficient design.