Comparison between RabbitMQ and MSMQ

I wrote a blog post a while back comparing MSMQ and RabbitMQ (among others):

http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/message-queue-shootout.html

RabbitMQ gave slightly better performance than MSMQ, but both were comprehensively out performed by ZeroMQ. If performance is your main criteria, you should definitely look at ZeroMQ.

It's worth noting that RabbitMQ and MSMQ are very different beasts. MSMQ is a simple store-and-forward queue. It doesn't provide any messaging patterns, such as pub/sub, or routing. For anything beyond simple point-to-point messaging you'd probably want to use a service bus library such as NServiceBus or MassTransit on top of MSMQ.

RabbitMQ is a sophisticated server product that provides complex messaging patterns, topics and routing out-of-the-box. You also get centralized management and DR, something you'd have to implement yourself if you chose MSMQ.