When would you choose Virtual Topics over regular Topics?

Choose Virtual Topics when multiple independent consumer groups each need to reliably receive every message, with the durability and load-balancing guarantees of a Queue, without configuring true durable subscriptions for every group.

Each consumer group listens on its own Consumer.<name>.VirtualTopicName queue, and ActiveMQ fans out one publish to all of those queues automatically; within a group, multiple worker instances share the load like a normal queue. This avoids the operational overhead of managing durable subscriber client IDs while still guaranteeing no group misses a message, which plain non-durable topic subscribers would.

A concrete example: an order-placed event published to a Virtual Topic might need to reach both a shipping consumer group and an analytics consumer group. Each group gets its own queue-backed subscription, and either group can run multiple worker instances that share the load internally, all while both groups independently guarantee they'll never miss an order event.