real time message delivery w microservices tho

Hey everyone, I'm putting together a new system and I need a way to reliably send messages in real-time between different microservices. You know, for things like chat apps and notifications. We have a lot of services that have to communicate instantly. What have you all found works best? Are message queues such as Kafka or RabbitMQ the way to go, or is there a more direct microservice-to-microservice pattern for real-time stuff that scales up well? I'd love to hear what has been successful for you.