When comparing ZeroMQ vs Kafka, the Slant community recommends ZeroMQ for most people. In the question“What are the best message queue servers?” ZeroMQ is ranked 3rd while Kafka is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose ZeroMQ is:
ZeroMQ is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open Source
ZeroMQ is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Pro Designed to be Fast and Lightweight
Pro Optimized for performance
Kafka is optimized for supporting a huge number of users.
Pro Native mirroring support
Kafka has native support for mirroring.
Pro Native compression support
Kafka has native support for compression.
Cons
Con More complicated scenarios require more setup
ZeroMQ is very fast due to its simplicity, but as a result of this, doing anything harder than passing messages between 2 peers will require a lot more work from the user.
Con Java is a resource hog
Java is a resource hog, making this far too slow unless you have money to throw at multiple servers with 1/2TB of ram.
Con Need Zookeeper
Kafka can only work with Zookeeper