We Migrated from RabbitMQ to Kafka in Production — Here's Why (And What We Learned)

When I started building backend systems with Node.js, RabbitMQ was my go-to message broker.

It powered almost everything:

• Email queues
• Background jobs
• Automation workers
• Cron services
• Real-time processing

It worked really well.

But as our platform grew, we started processing significantly more events every day. More services needed the same data, our queues became larger, and scaling became increasingly difficult.

That's when we decided to migrate part of our system from RabbitMQ to Apache Kafka.

This article isn't about saying RabbitMQ is bad.

It's about sharing what we learned after using both in production.

Our Architecture

Our platform consisted of multiple microservices:

• Lead Processing Service
• Automation Workers
• Notification Service
• Email Service
• Analytics
• Cron Service

Initially everything communicated through RabbitMQ.