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The Daily Insight

Is Amazon SQS like Kafka?

Author

Christopher Pierce

Updated on February 25, 2026

kafka is Apache product and SQS is Amazon product, high level they both are used to store data for a defined time.

Is AWS SQS like RabbitMQ?

SQS is a proprietary system developed by AWS. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, started as an implementation of AMQP, an open standard for messaging. AMQP allows for interoperation between different vendors and platforms. Language support is rich in both solutions, though RabbitMQ leads the way due to its open nature.

Is Kafka better than RabbitMQ?

Is Kafka higher performance than RabbitMQ? Both Kafka and RabbitMQ optimize for performance, which can be very hard to quantify depending on your specific use case. While Kafka has a very high throughput, RabbitMQ excels at low latency message delivery.

Why Kafka is better than SQS?

With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use. On the other hand, Kafka is detailed as “Distributed, fault tolerant, high throughput pub-sub messaging system”.

Is Amazon SNS Kafka?

The use-cases for Kafka and Amazon SQS/Amazon SNS are quite different. Kafka, as you wrote, is a distributed publish-subscribe system. It is designed for very high throughput, processing thousands of messages per second. Of course you need to setup and cluster it for yourself.

Does AWS support Kafka?

Kafka Streams applications are supported by Amazon MSK. Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with AWS container orchestration services like Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), which allows you to easily run, scale, and secure containerized applications.

Is RabbitMQ Hipaa compliant?

RabbitMQ is an open source multi-protocol messaging broker. Compliance: HIPAA-ready, PCI-DSS, SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, ISO 27701, and GDPR.

How is AWS SQS different from other Queueing frameworks like RabbitMQ?

@old_sound The difference is that running SQS you only pay for usage (sending and receiving messages) while running RabbitMQ has the hidden costs (above the EC2 usage) of making sure the service is running, monitored, and patched including both the app and underlying operating system.

Is Kafka similar to SNS?

Why ActiveMQ is better than Kafka?

Kafka is way faster than ActiveMQ. It can handle millions of messages per sec. ActiveMQ supports both message queues and publishes/subscribe messaging systems. On the other hand, Kafka is based on publish/subscribe but does have certain advantages of message-queues.

How does IronMQ compare to Kafka and SQS?

While both Kafka and SQS are scalable, neither is as fast as IronMQ. The lightweight, lightning fast messaging service offered by Iron outperforms competitors like RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ, while bringing you an intuitive user interface and a robust feature set that allows you to do more with your data.

What are the message size limits for Kafka and RabbitMQ messages?

While Kafka and RabbitMQ don’t provide a default message size limit, AWS provides some limits around SQS and SNS messages – converting the messages into S3 objects after they reach a certain size.

Is RabbitMQ a good alternative to Apache Kafka?

With a message rate of about 20k+ msgs/sec which is much less than Kafka, it’s sufficient enough for most use cases. Due to it’s platform-independent framework and ease of use, RabbitMQ is a very mature message broker offering with a lot of extended support from the community. Apache Kafka requires that you host and manage the framework.

Should you choose Amazon SQS or Apache Kafka?

Amazon SQS and Apache Kafka are popular solutions on the market, but they aren’t created equal. Here’s what you should know about these platforms along with the associated pros and cons for each solution. While you’re comparing, be sure to check out IronMQ’s flexible, highly scalable Message Queue by starting a 14-day free trial.