2023 Messaging Benchmark Report: Apache Pulsar vs. RabbitMQ vs. NATS JetStream

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When building scalable, reliable, and efficient applications, choosing the right messaging and streaming platform is critical. In this 2023 messaging benchmark report, we compare the technical performances of three of the most popular messaging platforms: Apache Pulsar, RabbitMQ, and NATS JetStream.

We conducted four benchmark tests to evaluate each platform’s performance under various conditions, such as workload variations, node failure, and backlogs. The aim was to assess each platform’s responses to these conditions and to provide insights into their capabilities in a given environment. Read the full report here.

Key benchmark findings include:

• Pulsar showed a higher peak consumer throughput of 2.6M msgs/s compared to RabbitMQ’s 48K msgs/s and NATS JetStream’s 160K msgs/s.
• Pulsar outperformed RabbitMQ during the backlog drain with a stable publish rate of 100K msgs/s, while RabbitMQ's publish rate dropped by more than 50%.
• Pulsar's p99 latency was 300x better than RabbitMQ and 40x better than NATS JetStream at a topic count of 50.
• Pulsar demonstrated better scalability, handling increasing loads and numbers of topics more effectively than NATS JetStream and RabbitMQ.

Apache Kafka was not included in our benchmark as it does not support "queuing" scenarios. If you want more information on Kafka, please refer to the Pulsar vs. Kafka 2022 Benchmark report.

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