Kafka and RabbitMQ both move messages and are not interchangeable. One is a distributed log, the other is a message router. Picking the wrong one means a year of fighting the abstractions. Here is the workload-based decision tree, the operational realities of each, and the rare case where you need both.
Whenever your code does “write to the database, then publish to Kafka,” there is a window where one succeeds and the other does not. The outbox pattern closes that window with a single extra table and 60 lines of dispatcher code. Here is how it works and why every alternative ends up reinventing it.