onkara
I am trying to wrap my head around the difference between Oban & RabbitMQ i.e. when does it make sense to use Oban vs RabbitMQ?
I know RabbitMQ is one extra component in your infrastructure requiring special config, monitoring etc so from that perspective Oban is easier to setup/monitor. But in terms of support for specific use cases or features which one would you choose and why?
Where Next?
Trending in Questions
Other Trending Topics
Latest Oban Threads
Latest on Elixir Forum
Sponsor Spotlight
Catch errors, track performance, monitor hosts and more.
Categories:
Sub Categories:
Forums
Popular Tags
- #ecto
- #liveview
- #troubleshooting
- #learning-elixir
- #library
- #deployment
- #erlang
- #testing
- #genserver
- #mix
- #absinthe
- #remote-other
- #otp
- #plug
- #how-to-question
- #macros
- #postgres
- #elixirconf
- #channels
- #exunit
- #discussion
- #code-sync
- #podcasts
- #javascript
- #onsite
- #dialyzer
- #docker
- #authentication
- #umbrella
- #full-time-contract
- #podcasts-by-brainlid
- #ecto-query
- #elixirconf-us
- #ai
- #blog-post
- #elixir-ls
- #phoenix_html
- #iex
- #graphql
- #genstage
- #websockets
- #supervisor
- #advent-of-code
- #distillery
- #processes
- #api
- #forms
- #metaprogramming
- #hex
- #security
Our Sponsors
Build Elixir applications with speed and confidence.
Supporting innovation across the BEAM ecosystem.
Catch errors, track performance, monitor hosts and more.
Error tracking, logs, uptime, and Just Enough APM. Built for developers.
Elixir, Erlang & BEAM conferences from Code Sync - join us in 2026!
Producing high quality Elixir screencasts since 2017.
**Building the future of software with AI, trust, and human connection.**
The deployment platform built for Elixir: PaaS ease, VPS control.
The team behind Membrane, Popcorn, LiveDebugger. Available for hire.
Courses that'll move you from confusion to "Aha, now I get it!"
Showing Posts 1 to 10- Show Best Posts
- Show All (oldest first)
- Show All (newest first)
kokolegorille
They don’t really compete in the same space…
Oban is kinda job scheduler, backed by database.
RabbitMQ is kinda Enterprise Bus, where You submit and listen to events.
onkara
But could Oban be used for submitting and listening for events like RabbitMQ? and conversely can RabbitMQ be used as job scheduler?
It seems RabbitMQ will be well suited when integrating 2 or more applications through a common bus using events, right?
kokolegorille
Not really, You need a rabbitmq client. You use Oban to start a job each night for example.
Right
onkara
In terms of performance at what point in time does Oban/Postgres show its limitations to warrant using RabbitMQ?
kokolegorille
Oban is not RabbitMQ, I don’t see one replacing the other.
sorentwo
RabbitMQ is purely a message broker, which is suitable for sending persistent messages between nodes. It doesn’t handle scheduling, retries, concurrency, testing concerns, or any of the other features Oban provides. To get some of those features you’ll need to use a library like Broadway, but it still won’t handle errors/retries/schedules/discards or provide the ability to query your data.
Regarding the performance, Oban can easily process 1-10k jobs per-queue per-node, depending on your concurrency levels.
onkara
in what unit of time?
sorentwo
That is per second, as measured on my local machine.
onkara
@sorentwo Since you are the author of Oban, is it possible for you to share benchmarks since 1-10 is pretty wide range and I need to justify to my superiors in a Forture 200 company the choice of using Oban vs RabbitMQ, which I understand is not the right choice for job scheduling and requires jumping hoops and managing retries etc.
sorentwo
Some benchmarks are included in the Oban repo. The variance is down to two factors:
With a cool down of 1ms and a concurrency of 1, you can run at most 1k in a second. With a more realistic concurrency of 10 you can run 10k in a minute.
Most of my benchmarking focuses on throughput, or how many jobs can be processed with sustained inserts and execution simultaneously.