Kafka: Distributed log. High throughput. Messages persist. Good for event streaming, analytics pipelines. LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber use it.
RabbitMQ: Traditional message broker. Flexible routing. Good for task queues and RPC patterns.
AWS SQS: Managed queue. Simple. Scales automatically. Good for decoupling AWS services.
In interviews, mention the specific tool. "I'd use Kafka for the event stream because we need high throughput and message replay capability."