Is RabbitMQ Open Source? Do You Need a Commercial License?

RabbitMQ is one of the world’s most widely deployed open-source message brokers, built on a reliable Erlang foundation and designed to run across distributed nodes in your backend systems, handling message queues, message delivery, and high-throughput workloads across industries. But one of the most common questions we hear is:

👉 “Is RabbitMQ open source, or do I need a commercial license?”

The answer: RabbitMQ is open source. The RabbitMQ server is distributed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0). That means anyone can run a RabbitMQ instance, contribute to its development, or build new tools and integrations — without paying a license fee.

At 7S, we specialise in RabbitMQ support and development, and we believe the open source licensing of RabbitMQ is not just a technical detail. It’s what makes RabbitMQ such a powerful, flexible, and future-proof message-oriented middleware.

But there’s more to this question than a simple yes or no.

Licensing of RabbitMQ Source Code

RabbitMQ’s open source licensing means:

You can deploy RabbitMQ freely on private cloud, public cloud, or on-prem infrastructure.

You can build it from source (direct from RabbitMQ GitHub) and use it in Docker, Kubernetes, or VMs with your own defaults and manual configurations, whether you’re installing RabbitMQ for a small application or a large-scale distributed system.

💡 What is RabbitMQ?

The key point: you don’t need a commercial license to run RabbitMQ in production. However, some organisations choose commercial support contracts for reassurance. The important thing is that the choice remains yours.

When Open Source Becomes Enterprise

RabbitMQ began as a community-driven project. Today it’s an enterprise-critical infrastructure, powering financial transactions, e-commerce, IoT, logistics, and more.

But with that growth comes risk:

• Vendor pressure to upgrade to commercial models.
• Proprietary cloud tie-ins that undermine portability.
• Feature prioritisation that reflects corporate strategy more than community need.

So when someone asks “Do you need a commercial license for RabbitMQ?”, what they may really mean is:

Can I trust the open source RabbitMQ server to stay reliable long-term?

Will it continue to support multiple messaging protocols like AMQP, MQTT, and STOMP?

Will the management interface and client libraries stay open to the whole community?

Some clients come to us feeling cornered into commercial models, only to rediscover that open source RabbitMQ still gives them everything they need, provided they have the right expertise to deploy and maintain it with confidence.

The Real Value of Open Source RabbitMQ

The true value of RabbitMQ being open source isn’t just “free as in no license fee.” It’s:

Autonomy: Run RabbitMQ where you want — bare metal, Docker, Kubernetes, cloud — without restrictions.

Transparency: Inspect the code, contribute fixes, or extend functionality through community plugins.

Flexibility: Configure exchanges and queues in multiple ways to suit microservice communication, data pipelines, or high availability clusters.

Diversity of tools: Client libraries exist for almost every programming language, from Java to Python, Go, and beyond.

Resilience: With over a hundred contributors, RabbitMQ isn’t dependent on one company’s quarterly roadmap.

Put simply: the freedom to choose how you deploy, scale, and manage your RabbitMQ instances is what makes it so valuable.

Because RabbitMQ supports advanced routing logic, durable queues, stream messaging, and flexible subscribe patterns, teams can adapt it to everything from microservices to event-driven architectures without needing a commercial add-on.

Community Contributions and Ecosystem

The future of RabbitMQ depends on keeping its open source roots strong. Anyone can:

• Contribute code, bug fixes, or documentation.
• Build new plugins for security, monitoring, or deployment automation — including integrations for platforms like VMware Tanzu.
• Share installation guides, configuration tips, or production patterns.

This is what keeps RabbitMQ adaptable, portable, and free from lock-in — a community-driven messaging platform rather than a vendor-controlled product.

Conclusion: Do You Need a Commercial License for RabbitMQ?

The question of licensing isn’t really about legal terms, it’s about the direction of the project. RabbitMQ must remain open source, not just in name but in spirit, if it’s to continue as the trusted backbone of messaging infrastructure worldwide.

That’s why we invest our expertise back into the community and why we advocate fiercely for RabbitMQ’s open source core. Because once you give up autonomy, you’re no longer truly choosing your own roadmap.

So: do you need a commercial license for RabbitMQ?

Legally, no.

Strategically, it depends. Some businesses want the comfort of vendor-backed contracts. Others value independence above all.