Caching and messaging
Apache Kafka has 5 supported release lines and RabbitMQ has 1. RabbitMQ 4.2 reached end of life on Jul 31, 2026. Both are open source: Apache Kafka under Apache-2.0, RabbitMQ under MPL-2.0.
Last checked against endoflife.date, deps.dev, OSV.dev and CISA KEV.
Every value links to its source. Where a row doesn’t apply to one of them, the cell says why.
| Compared on |  Apache Kafka |  RabbitMQ |
|---|---|---|
| Support and releases | ||
| Supported release lines | ||
| Latest release | ||
| Releases in the last 12 months | ||
| Security | ||
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | Not tracked as a package on OSV.dev | |
| OpenSSF Scorecard | ||
| Licence and hosting | ||
| Licence | ||
| How you run it | Self-hosted, or managed services such as Confluent Cloud and Amazon MSK | Self-hosted, or managed services such as Amazon MQ and CloudAMQP |
| Adoption | ||
| GitHub stars | ||
| Apache Kafka | RabbitMQ |
|---|---|
| Supported release lines | |
| Latest release | |
| Releases in the last 12 months | |
| Apache Kafka | RabbitMQ |
|---|---|
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | |
Not tracked as a package on OSV.dev | |
| OpenSSF Scorecard | |
| Apache Kafka | RabbitMQ |
|---|---|
| Licence | |
| How you run it | |
Self-hosted, or managed services such as Confluent Cloud and Amazon MSK | Self-hosted, or managed services such as Amazon MQ and CloudAMQP |
| Apache Kafka | RabbitMQ |
|---|---|
| GitHub stars | |
Read across for what matters to you. Each answer comes from the data above or the project’s licence and hosting options.
| If you need | Apache Kafka | RabbitMQ |
|---|---|---|
| An open-source licence | Yes: Apache-2.0 | Yes: MPL-2.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | Yes: From Confluent Cloud and Amazon MSK | Yes: From Amazon MQ and CloudAMQP |
| You can run it on your own servers | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | No end dates published | Only the newest line (4.3); no end dates published |
| Apache Kafka | RabbitMQ |
|---|---|
| An open-source licence | |
Yes: Apache-2.0 | Yes: MPL-2.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | |
Yes: From Confluent Cloud and Amazon MSK | Yes: From Amazon MQ and CloudAMQP |
| You can run it on your own servers | |
Yes: Yes, it’s software you install | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | |
No end dates published | Only the newest line (4.3); no end dates published |
Distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput data pipelines
Robust message broker with flexible routing and delivery guarantees
From StackPrism’s curated notes. Pricing isn’t covered here: it changes often, so check each vendor’s pricing page.
Both move messages between services, but they’re built differently. Kafka is a distributed log: messages are kept for a retention period and consumers read at their own pace, so events can be replayed. RabbitMQ is a broker that routes messages through exchanges to queues and removes them once they’re acknowledged (it also offers streams).
Release lines and end-of-life dates come from endoflife.date, release counts from deps.dev’s publish dates, and advisories from OSV.dev, counted once per flaw even when it’s listed under several ids, and checked against CISA’s list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited. Status and incident history come from each vendor’s public status feed; licences from each project’s licence file or the vendor’s licensing page, linked in the table.
The data refreshes every few hours and the time it was checked is shown above. There’s no pricing and no overall winner: which one fits depends on your constraints. To see how the versions you actually run hold up, check your repo.
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