It is stupid to compare those two beasts.

BizTalk Server is a pricey, huge development and run-time system, it includes tons of the tools, supports tons of protocols and systems. It works for very specialized middle ware integration stack. It integrates big and complex systems as SAP, CRM, Oracle and intermediates many protocols and standards as SOAP, EDI, SWIFT, FTP, tons of them.

It is a messaging system.

ZeroMQ is a low-level, wire-levelprotocol, the same level as TCP. It has ultra-simple API. It isimplemented as a library for dozens languages as C#, Java, Python, PHP, C++, COBOL, Ada, Haskel, F#, Erlang, etc. It works in the most OS: Windows, Linux, QNX… It is free and works under open-source license.

It is a messaging system.

BizTalk implements many messaging exchange patterns: Request-Response, Pub-Sub, Queue, Message Broker, Router, Convoy.

0MQ implements the same: Request-Response, Pub-Sub, Pub-Sub with Topics, Queue, Message Broker, Router…

BizTalk development stack is compounded of several editors. BizTalk run-time stack includes several services on top of SQL Server, several tools, and tons of dll-s and SQL code.

0MQ is just a library, a dll. Library per language, per OS.


Why I feel so comfortable with this 0MQ?
Why I think it is a serious choice to do messaging in my real-life messaging?
Do I want to abandon the comfort of a big track to ride almost bare-bone wheels?