If I had to summarize, here’s what I’d say:
If you need commercial support, go for NServiceBus. If you’re comfortable with using forums as a means of support, MassTransit is a great option. The developers have been very responsive to our issues so far. If you choose MassTransit, now you will choose between MSMQ and RabbitMQ. If you need DTC go with MSMQ. If you want more features and better administration, go with RabbitMQ.
On our project, we switched from NServiceBus to MassTransit for two reasons:
- MassTransit is free
- We love RabbitMQ
I’ve used both frameworks. I’ve used MassTransit longer than NServiceBus. Here are the highlights as I see them.
Cost:
- MassTransit is Apache 2.0 licensed and free for commercial production use, whereas NServiceBus is not.
Support:
- As Udi mentioned, there is an option for commercial NServiceBus support, I haven’t seen that for MassTransit.
Transport:
- MassTransit supports MSMQ and RabbitMQ
NServiceBus supports only MSMQRabbitMQ is supported in NServiceBus 4+
RabbitMQ vs MSMQ:
- MSMQ support DTC (distributed transaction coordinator) for transactions involving multiple processes on potentially multiple machines (e.g. SQL server, Windows Service)
- RabbitMQ has an excellent Administration interface
- MSMQ has been around longer and is a Microsoft product
- RabbitMQ is newer, open source, free, and sponsored by VMWare
- MSMQ is installed on most Windows machines by default
Udi Dahan and the MassTransit guys (Chris Patterson, Dru Sellers, and Travis Smith) are all brilliant people.