Broker capability comparison

One model. A vocabulary per broker.

The operational layer is identical across every platform. What sits under it is not, and pretending otherwise is how consoles end up hiding the thing you needed to see. This page maps each operational area onto each broker's own concepts — a translation table, not a feature checklist.

How to read this

A partition is not a queue. A stream is not an exchange.

Rows line up the question, not the answer. Where two brokers use the same word for different behaviour — or different words for the same behaviour — the table says so rather than smoothing it over.

01Operational areas

The same question, asked of every platform.

Read a row across: that is one operational question, and the term each broker answers it with. Read a column down: that is what an operator working on that platform actually deals with.

Operational area	Apache KafkaFully supported	RedisFully supported	RabbitMQFully supported	Apache Artemis (formerly ActiveMQ Artemis)Fully supported
Core resourcesWhat you browse and operate on	Topics and partitions	Keys and streams	Exchanges and queues	Addresses, queues and subscriptions
Consumer modelHow work is shared out	Consumer groups	Stream consumer groups	Consumers	Consumers and durable subscriptions
Backlog signalThe number that says "behind"	Consumer lag	Pending entries / stream lag	Queue depth	Queue depth
Routing modelHow a message reaches a consumer	Topic and partition	Key / stream	Exchange and binding	Address and routing type
Message operationsWhat the console lets you do to a message	Browse and produce	Inspect and stream operations	Inspect and publish	Browse and publish
Access controlsWhat the broker itself enforces	ACLs	Redis permissions	Vhost and resource permissions	Broker address permissions

Community covers Kafka and Kafka-compatible brokers — Redis, RabbitMQ, Apache Artemis and Memcached ship in Commercial. Where a broker has no counterpart for a concept, the honest answer is that the concept does not exist there — not that support is missing.

02The layer that is identical

Everything above the broker is the same.

This is the half of the product that does not vary by platform. It is defined once and resolved the same way whichever broker a resource belongs to — which is what makes an access review one screen instead of one per broker (Access Review is a Commercial screen).

01EnvironmentsDeclared once, reused by every connection on every platform

02ConnectionsEndpoints and credentials held per environment, encrypted at rest

03ResourcesOne place to browse them, with metadata and ownership recorded the same way for each

04HealthCluster, instance and address state in one place

05CapabilitiesEach server is asked what it supports; what it cannot do is shown with the reason

06SearchOne search over every connected environment

07Teams and rolesRead, operate and administer, assigned globally, per environment or per connection

08GuardrailsRead-only environments, a reason before any write in a guarded one, and a reason for every destructive action

09AuditOne entry shape, one trail, one export

03Where the differences matter

Three places the vocabularies refuse to line up.

These are the distinctions a unified console is most tempted to flatten. Each one changes what an operator should do next, so each one is kept.

Backlog is not one number

Kafka lag is a distance between offsets. A RabbitMQ or Artemis queue depth is a count of messages sitting in a queue. Redis has both a stream lag and a pending list, which answer different questions. Showing one "backlog" figure across all of them would be a lie that costs an incident.

Delivery is not one guarantee

A Kafka partition preserves order and lets a group re-read it. A RabbitMQ queue hands each message to one consumer and forgets it on acknowledgement. An Artemis durable subscription keeps copies for a subscriber that is not there. The console does not imply a shared guarantee none of them make.

Access control is enforced twice

BROKA's scoped role decides whether an action is offered. The broker's own ACL, permission or authorization decides whether it succeeds. Both layers stay visible, because a console that only showed its own model would tell you an operation was allowed right up until the broker refused it.

Pick a starting point

Start with the broker you already run.

Every platform page goes into its own concepts at depth. The operational layer around them is the same one, whichever you open first.

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