RabbitMQ is a popular open-source message broker for Node.js developers, enabling asynchronous communication between applications and services. Its key features include message routing, persistence, and high availability. Message queues offer benefits such as decoupling components, scalability, and fault tolerance when building Node.js applications. To get started with RabbitMQ in your project, install the `amqplib` library using npm and establish a connection to the RabbitMQ server.