Apache Pulsar (by Yahoo) seems to be the next generation of Apache Kafka.
Apache RocketMQ (by Alibaba) seems to be the next generation of Apache ActiveMQ.
Both are open source distributed messaging and streaming data platforms.
But how do they compare? When should I prefer one over another in terms of features and performance?
Is Pulsar (like Kafka) strictly better at streaming, and RocketMQ (like ActiveMQ) strictly better at messaging?
Looks like you answer your own question.
To be fair, the main advantages of Pulsar against RocketMQ are:
Pulsar is oriented to topics and multi-topic. RocketMQ is more interesting in batch and keeps the index of the messages. RocketMQ you still need an adaptor to keep up with the backwards, Pulsar in the other hand comes built-in. RabbitMQ is push model and RocketMQ is pulling model since has zero-loss tolerance. Pulsar offers message priority and RocketMQ since it's a queue doesn't support that.