What Is RabbitMQ and How Does It Compare to Pulsar?

Modern businesses are constantly required to face many challenges to beat their competitors and keep their customers satisfied. One of the biggest challenges is handling more data than ever before in history and doing it in a timely and actionable manner. But in regards to RabbitMQ vs Pulsar, there are some key differences between these messaging platforms.

The answer to this problem is shifting to real-time data processing solutions. However, not every business has the budget or the necessary expertise to abandon their traditional database processing architectures. 

Since modern business needs demand innovative solutions, modern companies are constantly looking for the latest technology developments to help them tackle their challenges and stay ahead of the competition. That is where distributed messaging platforms come in. 

These platforms are the foundation of all stream processing systems and are vital for business organizations that rely on such solutions. These companies need quick and actionable insights, and their needs created an entirely new industry of real-time messaging solutions. 

Two such solutions are RabbitMQ and Apache Pulsar. Although similar, both distributed messaging platforms have their unique selling points. Let’s do a RabbitMQ vs Pulsar comparison to see which solution is better and why.

RabbitMQ vs Pulsar

To better understand the differences between the two, we must first define what these distributed messaging systems are and what they do. 

Created by Rabbit Technologies, RabbitMQ is an open-source, distributed messaging engine that allows the user to implement data brokering from one point to another, including messaging requests, replies, and subscriptions. 

Since it comes with the Mozilla Public License, anyone can use it and personalize its architecture to better suit their specific distributed messaging needs. RabbitMQ received an upgrade the moment a plug-in architecture was introduced as a stand-alone concept. 

Thanks to this upgrade, RabbitMQ can now enable support for a variety of different kinds of protocols. More importantly, it supports cluster deployment, which is crucial for handling huge workloads and ensuring server reliability and stability during heavy traffic. 

RabbitMQ is an excellent solution for all businesses that need a powerful distributed system to enable sending vast quantities of messages to multiple recipients at any scale. Since it has built-in libraries, you can use them to develop a messaging setup that matches your exact distributed messaging needs.

Pulsar, similarly, is also an open-source, distributed messaging platform. Yahoo developed it as a solution to Apache Kafka’s distributed messaging inconsistencies. Pulsar uses the same topics and subscriptions as Kafka and RabbitMQ to organize and manage large quantities of streaming data but with one significant difference – Pulsar does it with unprecedented scalability while ensuring minimal latency. 

Apart from publishing and subscription, Pulsar also uses BookKeeper and Zookeeper as storage and provides support for pinpointing message queueing using its native AIP. With Pulsar, you will be able to ensure delivering new messaging systems without any issues or shortcomings previously related to Kafka.

The advantages of Pulsar over RabbitMQ

The first thing we need to mention when it comes to RabbitMQ vs Pulsar comparison is that Pulsar is much faster than RabbitMQ, especially when it comes to the overall output speed throughout the entire infrastructure. RabbitMQ provides the lowest latency possible but only in scenarios when the load is down to 30MB/s. 

Overall, Pulsar provides better latency than RabbitMQ as the load increases. 

Both solutions offer similar features and high-availability functions, but RabbitMQ offers significantly less availability than Pulsar when it comes to performance and shared replication of shared partitions throughout availability zones. 

Pulsar also has another important edge over RabbitMQ as it supports distributed dependencies. Due to its push-based system, RabbitMQ almost operates like a traditional messaging system. While it is reliable, safe, and secure, it doesn’t cope well with heavy messaging traffic and massive data distribution. 

Suppose your business is required to handle workloads with high throughput. In that case, a managed Pulsar service is a much better solution because it gives you the option to choose the data sets you need at the moment and provides a higher level of control over your data flows across all your data pipelines. Apache Pulsar also beats RabbitMQ when it comes to storage architecture. 

Although both platforms use index-based systems, Pulsar provides much quicker access to organized data tree structures while also automatically aligning your data in individual loads eliminating any latency or low throughput issues. 

RabbitMQ is a better solution for storing messages for a short period, while Pulsar can store messages indefinitely.

RabbitMQ vs Pulsar – Handling big data loads

Every business is required to work with big data in one way or the other. In the realm of distributed messaging big data storage and management are two things that modern companies simply need to have. 

Big data management and storage require speed and capability to provide companies with actionable insights and support. Since this requires a lot of computing power, modern businesses need the most advanced solutions to handle big data loads quickly and efficiently. 

Although RabbitMQ and Pulsar aren’t big data technologies, they can provide the speed and distributed architecture needed for handling big data loads. Still, Pulsar delivers a better peak throughput and more adequate connectors required for supporting big data integrations.

RabbitMQ or Pulsar?

Compared to RabbitMQ, Pulsar provides much better benefits for delivering effective streaming on a larger scale with zero operational burdens. If you choose a reliable Pulsar provider such as Pandio, you’ll get a managed service supporting and maintaining your distributed messaging systems at almost no operational cost except for the features you choose to use. 

Pulsar is designed to provide users with optimal performance, latency, and reduced complexity for managing stateful functions, pub-subs, queues, and streams. It can optimize your entire neural network to bring your efficiency and overall performance to the next level. With Pandio Pulsar, you’ll get maximum uptime, enhanced security, high availability, interactive ANSI SQL data querying, real-time metrics, and a multi-tiered storage solution all in one platform. 

Suppose your business requires a unified solution for queuing and event streaming in a single platform. In that case, Pulsar should be your number one choice as it’s the best distributed messaging system for effective streaming on any scale. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, is perfect for light messaging with quick requests, responses, queuing, message deletion, and publishing.

Visit Pandio for more information on Pulsar!

Pandio offers a managed Pulsar service that includes machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data integration, higher throughput, and better latency at an affordable operational cost. You can choose the features you need and pay for only what you use. 

Pandio also allows you to test the platform for free to see if it can match your specific and unique needs. More importantly, Pandio offers cloud-native solutions for simplifying your data pipelines and enabling you to seamlessly move your data on demand and make all your data instantly accessible regardless of where it is stored.