Depending on the project a database (Postgres) can make a nice database, queue and cache. You get transactions among all three which which makes life much simpler in the beginning and it will happily march along processing thousands or tens of thousands of TPS. You can scale by adding read replicas and eventually moving to separate databases for each purpose.
If you're on the JVM then ActiveMQ (and other Java queues) will usually run embedded and have options to use a database for persistence.