Message Broker Throughput: RabbitMQ vs Kafka vs NATS

I started using NATS in one of my projects and was generally happy with it, but I wanted to verify the performance claims for myself. Is it really as fast as people say, or is that just marketing and cherry-picked benchmarks? The best way to find out was to write my own tests and compare NATS against the two most common alternatives: RabbitMQ and Kafka. This post covers throughput testing of all three brokers on two messaging patterns: async producer-consumer queue, and request-reply. Request-reply is not the typical use case for message brokers, but NATS supports it natively, so it was worth measuring how the others perform when forced into that pattern. Interactive results page: https://petrolmuffin.github.io/BrokersPerformance/ GitHub: https://github.com/PetrolMuffin/BrokersPerformance Test Environment All three brokers ran in Docker containers on the same host. No custom tuning was applied to any broker: default configurations only. CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS, 8 cores / 16 threads, 3.