RabbitMQ
Shares rank 5 of 19 message brokers by recommenders
Open source broker people trust for performance under load, especially with Celery, though critics say it needs real expertise to configure and operate.
Open source broker people trust for performance under load, especially with Celery, though critics say it needs real expertise to configure and operate.
23 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 57%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Performs well under load
“3 week solutions that last 6+ years under load look pretty nice in retrospect”
Comment from 14 Sep 2026 in “Distributed Systems Classics (2017)” “it has performed rather well for our use-cases over the years”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “30 Years of HPC: many hardware advances, little adoption of new languages” “it worked well under pressure (thanks, RabbitMQ)”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Django: what’s new in 6.0” Common choice with Celery
“If one has a stateful message queue or job task queue, e.g. RabbitMQ or Celery, one can use it.”
Comment from 28 May 2026 in “Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows” “Celery + RabbitMQ is hard to beat in the Python ecosystem for scaling.”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python” Very good, amazing technology
“I love rabbitmq. It's an amazing technology... But.. it does require quite a lot of expertise and know how to operate.”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “You probably don't need another database” “RabbitMQ is also very good, don't have production experience on it”
Comment from 7 Apr 2026 in “I Replaced Kafka, Redis, and RabbitMQ with One Tool – A Deep Dive into NATS” “RabbitMQ is also very good”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “I Replaced Kafka, Redis, and RabbitMQ with One Tool – A Deep Dive into NATS”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Needs expertise and configuration
“I love rabbitmq. It's an amazing technology... But.. it does require quite a lot of expertise and know how to operate.”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “You probably don't need another database” “Rabbit is slow and resource hungry and needs configuration.”
Comment from 9 Mar 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)” Workers lose connection or block
“workers losing connection with RabbitMQ”
Comment from 29 Nov 2025 in “A first look at Django's new background tasks” “RabbitMQ getting blocked requiring a forced restart”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres” Adds complexity to systems
“they go with microservices, Redis, RabbitMQ, etc, making the system more complex and less available”
Comment from 6 Dec 2025 in “100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite” “Trying to manage a highly available and durable rabbitmq or other message system”
Comment from 19 Aug 2026 in “PostgreSQL for Everything” “setting up Rabbit or Kafka gets a lot more complex”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Redis and the Cost of Ambition” Limitations and recurring problems
“problems that we ran into because of limitations of rabbitmq”
Comment from 19 Aug 2026 in “PostgreSQL for Everything” “RabbitMQ suffered from Mnesia problems for many years”
Comment from 27 May 2026 in “What I've Learned (So Far) Building Online Mini Games with Elixir and Swift” “We had never ending problems after that”
Comment from 20 Aug 2026 in “PostgreSQL for Everything”
Other message brokers people recommend
The four most recommended other message brokers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache Kafka | 53 | 55 | 49% | 12 | — | — |
| NATS | 34 | 16 | 68% | 9 | 7.5 yrs3 owners | Approved |
| Amazon SQS | 18 | 14 | 56% | 8 | — | — |
| Redpanda | 17 | 4 | 81% | 7 | — | Approved |
| RabbitMQThis page | 13 | 10 | 57% | 9 | — | — |
What people said
25 of the 27 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“RabbitMQ, used by Reddit, uses Erlang and BEAM.”
“3 week solutions that last 6+ years under load look pretty nice in retrospect”
“Everything has to be done in its weird and quirky way”
“We had never ending problems after that”
“Trying to manage a highly available and durable rabbitmq or other message system”
“problems that we ran into because of limitations of rabbitmq”
“I'd look at things like RabbitMQ or Garage”
“I tried to use rabbitmq for a small app, installed it, configured it and then it didn't work.”
“I love rabbitmq. It's an amazing technology... But.. it does require quite a lot of expertise and know how to operate.”
“Seems like a very mature and completely open source tool.”
“If one has a stateful message queue or job task queue, e.g. RabbitMQ or Celery, one can use it.”
“RabbitMQ suffered from Mnesia problems for many years”
“setting up Rabbit or Kafka gets a lot more complex”
“it has performed rather well for our use-cases over the years”
“RabbitMQ is also very good, don't have production experience on it”
“RabbitMQ is also very good”
“Rabbit is slow and resource hungry and needs configuration.”
“Celery + RabbitMQ is hard to beat in the Python ecosystem for scaling.”
“RabbitMQ getting blocked requiring a forced restart”
“it worked well under pressure (thanks, RabbitMQ)”
“they go with microservices, Redis, RabbitMQ, etc, making the system more complex and less available”
“there's RabbitMQ as well, which I always forget when asked”
“RabbitMQ and friends are just a pain to use.”
“workers losing connection with RabbitMQ”
“Use Kafka/RabbitMQ/Redis PLEASE.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.