Reactive programming is an event-driven paradigm focused on data flow and treating code as a set of behaviors in response to events. RxJava is a library that uses observable sequences to compose asynchronous and event-based programs in a reactive style. It provides operators like map, flatMap, and filter to transform streams of events. Akka implements the actor model with actors that react to immutable messages in isolation through message passing. Both RxJava and Akka support reactive principles like scalability, resilience and responsiveness but require additional work.