# RabbitMQ

13 Hacker News commenters recommended RabbitMQ and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Open source broker people trust for performance under load, especially with Celery, though critics say it needs real expertise to configure and operate.

## Why people recommend it

- Performs well under load (3 comments): "3 week solutions that last 6+ years under load look pretty nice in retrospect" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703150)) "it has performed rather well for our use-cases over the years" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806120)) "it worked well under pressure (thanks, RabbitMQ)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46213237))
- Common choice with Celery (2 comments): "If one has a stateful message queue or job task queue, e.g. RabbitMQ or Celery, one can use it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314375)) "Celery + RabbitMQ is hard to beat in the Python ecosystem for scaling." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799812))
- Very good, amazing technology (3 comments): "I love rabbitmq. It's an amazing technology... But.. it does require quite a lot of expertise and know how to operate." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806785)) "RabbitMQ is also very good, don't have production experience on it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47669339)) "RabbitMQ is also very good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47667119))

## What people warn about

- Needs expertise and configuration (2 comments): "I love rabbitmq. It's an amazing technology... But.. it does require quite a lot of expertise and know how to operate." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806785)) "Rabbit is slow and resource hungry and needs configuration." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47304780))
- Workers lose connection or block (2 comments): "workers losing connection with RabbitMQ" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46085604)) "RabbitMQ getting blocked requiring a forced restart" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338710))
- Adds complexity to systems (3 comments): "they go with microservices, Redis, RabbitMQ, etc, making the system more complex and less available" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177444)) "Trying to manage a highly available and durable rabbitmq or other message system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367034)) "setting up Rabbit or Kafka gets a lot more complex" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48124691))
- Limitations and recurring problems (3 comments): "problems that we ran into because of limitations of rabbitmq" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366040)) "RabbitMQ suffered from Mnesia problems for many years" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291810)) "We had never ending problems after that" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49369154))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Apache Kafka](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-kafka.md): 53 recommend
- [NATS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nats.md): 34 recommend
- [Redpanda](https://hackerapproved.com/p/redpanda.md): 17 recommend
- [PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgresql-listen-notify.md): 13 recommend
- [S2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/s2-lite.md): 9 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "RabbitMQ", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rabbitmq/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).