[BradRuderman]

It seems like Disque is a "simplified" Kafka, or a more vertically purposed Redis. It seems that it differs from RabbitMQ significantly because rabbit requires a queue to push the messages in, while Disque allows jobs to be pushed independently of consumers being setup.

[lobster_johnson]

Kafka is arguably simpler, at least in terms of data model, than Disque. Disque needs to handle acking and queue mutation and things like lock timeouts and dead lettering, all of which complicates its queue structure and API. Kafka queues (partitions, to be precise) are append-only, which simplifies a lot of things.