ActiveMQ vs Apollo vs Kafka

Question

I don\'t have any previous experience with *MQs and I\'m looking to build knowledge on JMS and message queues in general. That way, I wonder whether I should start with ActiveMQ

Answer 1

This is an older question but I'll provide a more modern answer here.

• The Apollo project is unofficially dead and they suggest Artemis is the new hotness. (link) The (seemingly) stalled development of Apollo does not give me confidence in Artemis's future.
• My experience is similar to Petter's answer in that ActiveMQ is feature rich and capable. However, it seems as if every release fixes random crashes and memory leaks and this does not inspire confidence. It's stable for my project (which uses clustering) but we have seen weird behavior and crashes in the broker over the last dozen or so releases (currently using 5.14.3)
• I have not used RabbitMQ (my current project is committed to ActiveMQ) but I will be trying it out on the next project that needs a messaging bus. Not having the kitchen sink of features to support will hopefully mean it is more stable.

EDIT: The 2.3.0 Apache Artemis release happened ~Sept 5 2017. So it does seem to be progressing as of now. But (link) changelog still seems too scary.