Apache Kafka
VerifiedOpen source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput, real-time data pipelines.
See all screenshots - Deployment Cloud Based, On Premises
- Starting price Free
- Free trial Not offered
- Best for Startups, SMEs, Enterprises
What is Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is an open source distributed event streaming platform originally built at LinkedIn and now maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. It stores streams of records in partitioned, replicated topics so producer and consumer applications can read and write data with low latency at very large scale. Kafka includes the Kafka Streams API for building stream processing applications and the Kafka Connect framework for moving data between Kafka and external systems.
Since Kafka 4.0, clusters run on Kafka's own built-in KRaft consensus protocol instead of requiring a separate Apache ZooKeeper deployment, and Kafka supports exactly-once processing through idempotent producers and transactions. It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and is free to download, run, and modify, with no official paid tier offered by the Apache Software Foundation itself.
Key Features of Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka lists 9 documented features, including Distributed, partitioned, and replicated commit log for event storage, High-throughput, low-latency message delivery at large scale and Production clusters that can scale to thousands of brokers and trillions of messages per day. The list below covers what the product does rather than how it is marketed.
- Distributed, partitioned, and replicated commit log for event storage
- High-throughput, low-latency message delivery at large scale
- Production clusters that can scale to thousands of brokers and trillions of messages per day
- KRaft consensus protocol for cluster metadata, removing the need for a separate ZooKeeper deployment since Kafka 4.0
- Built-in Kafka Streams API for stream processing, joins, and aggregations
- Kafka Connect framework with connectors for databases, search indexes, and cloud storage
- Exactly-once processing semantics with idempotent producers and transactions
- Multi-zone and multi-region replication for fault tolerance and high availability
- Tiered storage for offloading older log segments to lower-cost object storage
Apache Kafka Pricing
Apache Kafka lists one plan, at Free.
Apache Kafka (Open Source)
Free
Unlimited, self-hosted
Apache License 2.0; full distributed event streaming platform, community support only, no official paid tier from the Apache Software Foundation
Apache Kafka Specifications
Apache Kafka is available on web app. It offers an API and has a free plan.
- Deployment
- Cloud Based
- On Premises
- Billing cycle
- Monthly
- Desktop
- Web App
- Languages
- English
- Built for
- Startups
- SMEs
- Enterprises
- Integrations
- Kafka Connect connectors for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Amazon S3, JDBC-compatible databases, and JMS systems, plus Kafka Streams and ksqlDB for stream processing, and client libraries for Java, Python, Go, C/C++, and other languages
- Public API
- Yes
- Free trial
- No
- Free plan
- Yes
- Runs in browser
- No
- Customisable
- Yes
- Website
- kafka.apache.org
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