# Apache Kafka Reviews **Vendor:** The Apache Software Foundation **Category:** [Event Stream Processing Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/event-stream-processing) **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 131 ## About Apache Kafka Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation. It is designed to handle real-time data feeds with high throughput and low latency, making it ideal for building data pipelines, streaming analytics, and integrating data across various systems. Kafka enables organizations to publish, store, and process streams of records in a fault-tolerant and scalable manner, supporting mission-critical applications across diverse industries. Key Features and Functionality: - High Throughput and Low Latency: Kafka delivers messages at network-limited throughput with latencies as low as 2 milliseconds, ensuring efficient data processing. - Scalability: It can scale production clusters up to thousands of brokers, handling trillions of messages per day and petabytes of data, while elastically expanding and contracting storage and processing capabilities. - Durable Storage: Kafka stores streams of data safely in a distributed, durable, and fault-tolerant cluster, ensuring data integrity and availability. - High Availability: The platform supports efficient stretching of clusters over availability zones and connects separate clusters across geographic regions, enhancing resilience. - Stream Processing: Kafka provides built-in stream processing capabilities through the Kafka Streams API, allowing for operations like joins, aggregations, filters, and transformations with event-time processing and exactly-once semantics. - Connectivity: With Kafka Connect, it integrates seamlessly with hundreds of event sources and sinks, including databases, messaging systems, and cloud storage services. Primary Value and Solutions Provided: Apache Kafka addresses the challenges of managing real-time data streams by offering a unified platform that combines messaging, storage, and stream processing. It enables organizations to: - Build Real-Time Data Pipelines: Facilitate the continuous flow of data between systems, ensuring timely and reliable data delivery. - Implement Streaming Analytics: Analyze and process data streams in real-time, allowing for immediate insights and actions. - Ensure Data Integration: Seamlessly connect various data sources and sinks, promoting a cohesive data ecosystem. - Support Mission-Critical Applications: Provide a robust and fault-tolerant infrastructure capable of handling high-volume and high-velocity data, essential for critical business operations. By leveraging Kafka's capabilities, organizations can modernize their data architectures, enhance operational efficiency, and drive innovation through real-time data processing and analytics. ## Apache Kafka Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **high scalability** of Apache Kafka, allowing them to efficiently manage growing data volumes effortlessly. (3 reviews) - Users value the **high scalability and performance** of Apache Kafka, ideal for managing growing data volumes efficiently. (2 reviews) - Users praise the **high scalability and performance** of Apache Kafka, perfect for managing growing enterprise data effectively. (2 reviews) - Users value the **real-time data processing** capabilities of Kafka, praising its speed and reliability in handling large volumes. (2 reviews) - Users commend the **reliability** of Apache Kafka, praising its durability, fault tolerance, and scalability for data processing. (2 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of Apache Kafka, benefiting from its high performance in event-driven microservices. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **easy integrations** of Apache Kafka, enabling seamless connections across various applications and services. (1 reviews) - Features (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of integrations** with Kafka, enhancing data processing and scalability for their applications. (1 reviews) - Management Ease (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users face **operational complexity** with Apache Kafka, experiencing high resource consumption and limited message queuing features. (1 reviews) - Users struggle with **data management issues** in Apache Kafka, as it demands specialized skills for effective maintenance. (1 reviews) - Users find **debugging issues** in Apache Kafka challenging, often requiring additional effort for effective troubleshooting. (1 reviews) - Users find the **difficult learning** curve challenging, especially for smaller teams managing monitoring and scaling tasks. (1 reviews) - Users find the **limited customization options** of Apache Kafka can complicate initial setup and management tasks. (1 reviews) - Maintenance Issues (1 reviews) - Messaging Issues (1 reviews) - Required Expertise (1 reviews) - Users find **resource intensive learning** challenging due to operational complexity and a steep learning curve. (1 reviews) - Resource Management (1 reviews) ## Apache Kafka Reviews ### 1. Kafka Delivers Scalable, Durable Real-Time Performance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aayush M. | Data Engineer - Associate, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 21, 2026 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Best thing about Kafka is how it keep data in disk which helps it to scale and provide good performance while handling millions of real time data. It also provides high durability and we can easily go to previous offset and process same messages again in case of fault tolerance **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I don't think there is any cons of Kafka but definitely it is very complex for beginner level developer to setup infrastructure and also same for consumer group. They can have good documentation for managing partitions and monitoring **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mainly it solves handling millions of real time event streams at scale. And another best thing is it keeps all logs in its disk so we can retrieve any event anytime within its duration. ### 2. Reliable Real-Time Data Streaming at Scale with Kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2026 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** What I like most is how well it handles real-time data streaming at scale. As a data engineer, we’ve used Kafka to move and process streaming data between different systems, and it’s been very reliable. It’s great for decoupling producers and consumers, so different services can operate independently without breaking the pipeline. Once it’s set up properly, it can handle high volumes of data without much issue. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** The setup and maintenance can be quite heavy, especially if you’re managing it yourself. There’s a steep learning curve around topics, partitions, consumer groups, and tuning performance. Debugging issues or lag in consumers can also take time, and it’s not always obvious where the bottleneck is. It’s powerful, but definitely not the simplest tool to work with. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka helped us handle real-time data streaming in a scalable and reliable way. This has made our data pipelines more responsive and flexible, especially for use cases where near real-time data is important. ### 3. Durable, High-Throughput Event Streaming with Replayable Logs **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 14, 2026 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka gives a durable, partitioned commit-log that can handle massive throughput and lets you replay events at will, perfect for building resilient, real-time pipelines and stream processing with minimal latency. Deployment using docker is easy. Connector ecosystem is good for sink and source. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Since Kafka is JVM-based, it can feel heavier compared to some of the newer messaging systems written in Rust or C++. Those tend to have lower memory overhead and sometimes better raw performance. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Apache Kafka solves building event-driven data pipelines with minimal latency and durable, replayable delivery, making real-time analytics and stream processing straightforward. It’s excellent for high-throughput data collection and, thanks to its ecosystem of connectors, makes loading multiple sinks (including data warehouses) easy and pluggable. ### 4. Highly Scalable, Flexible Apache Kafka for Any Size Application **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pawan M. | Senior Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2026 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka is the best open source highly scalable Message Queue with flexible configuration and high modularity. Its perfect for smaller Proof of concept to large enterprise grade applications without the need to drastically change the tech stack **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I feel the documentation could be improved so that developers who start to work in Apache Kafka would have smoother learning curve. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have use Apache Kafka for building a distributed backend job processing pipeline. All the components works asynchronously and seamlessly scale without needing to worry much about the workload. Its one of the best way to take advantage of the job distribution and optimal hardware utilization when it comes to compute heavy workloads. ### 5. Apache kafka Streamlines Messaging with Reliable Data Queuing **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Keerthi Kumar S. | SDET, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2026 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache kafka is one of the best tools that I use almost daily to streamline messages. Queing of data messages makes it easier to read and execute things in order. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Sometimes the sorting functionality doesnt work which could be improved. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Apache Kafka helps me to read messages from a particular application and consume data in that particular order. This helps a lot to execute certain actions in proper order. ### 6. Apache Kafka: Real-Time Data Streaming **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Priyanka R. | Deputy Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 17, 2025 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** High throughput and low latency, scalability ,Durability & Fault Tolerance ,replay ability & Retention Kafka retains messages for a configurable period, allowing consumers to reprocess data or recover from failures without losing information **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Operational complexity, High resource consumption, limited Message Queuing Features **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Real-Time Data Streaming Kafka enables continuous, low-latency data flow between systems, making it ideal for use cases like fraud detection, recommendation engines, and live dashboards, durable and Reliable Messaging ### 7. A strong and reliable tool for real-time data streaming **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akshat J. | Infrastructure / DevOps Engineer - 2, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2025 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka handles large volumes of data really well and is very reliable once set up properly. We use it for real-time data processing between different parts of our system. It's fast, fault-tolerant, and can scale easily when traffic grows. The publish-subscribe model makes it simple to connect producers and consumers across different services. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Initial setup and configuration can be a bit tricky, especially if you’re new to distributed systems. Managing brokers and zookeepers manually can get complex. Also, monitoring and debugging issues sometimes takes extra effort unless you have good tooling in place. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka helps us move data between microservices in near real-time without delays. It’s useful for logging, metrics pipelines, user activity tracking, and even for alerting workflows. It keeps our system decoupled and helps scale better as we grow. ### 8. Unmatched Scalability and Performance for Enterprise Data Growth **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dakalo M. | Software Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 07, 2026 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** High scalability and performance making it ideal for growing data volumes in enterprises. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** It requires dedicated expertise for monitoring, scaling, and maintenance. Smaller teams often find this overwhelming. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We can stream more data at short period of time ### 9. Impressive High Performance **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abdullah H. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 13, 2025 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** High Performance and easy to use as event driven in Microservices **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** need more supporting AI in applications **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** its solving communications between microservices and applications ### 10. Great tool for event processing **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohit G. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 04, 2024 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka is highly scalable and easy to manage. Its disctributed architecture makes it handy for big organisation like ours. Easy to integrate with our java based applications. Very happy with the product. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** We have not encountered anything so far in our use. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using kafka as event stream processing tool and also as a message queue. In our product we have a huge number of events coming into our system which we put into the central data lake (developed over kafka) for further processing. ### 11. Writing wrapper over Apache Kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pawan J. | SDE - 1, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2024 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka is a distributed streaming platform, which designed for high-scalability use cases, event streaming, and log processing. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** There are some requirement (mission-critical transaction processing) from finance teams where data integrity, consistency, and security are more prominent concerns than in typical Kafka applications. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka is a distributed streaming platform, which designed for high-scalability use cases, event streaming, and log processing. My org working multiple high scale product so we neened similar functionality for those but as managed version so other/each teams don't have to managed everything and at there end. So I am building a wrapper over it and managed version of it. ### 12. Best option available to integrate event based/real-time tools & applications **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohammad I. | Internal Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2024 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** There are many things for which KAFKA has been very useful , few of them are listed below - 1. Performance have been superb. 2. The reliability has improved a lot in recent couple of years. 3. A common solution for both on-prem & cloud basedrequirements. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Not many I can think of - Initially we had faced some reliability issue but now that is sorted.Apart from that I have faced issue while troubleshooting (rarely required) **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has been very beneficial for our company - 1. Our architecture was changing for on-premise to cloud (was a big project and required around 2 years to completely migrate) but in the interim we had requirements for event streaming and we needed a solution which could work both in-premise and on-cloud so that we don't have to re-work once we migrate to cloud and KAFKA was the life saver. 2. Another use case i,s we are working to build a new framework and using KAFKA to publish status of jobs so that same can be integrated with the real-time batch monitoring dashboard. ### 13. Kafka - Best suited for event driven architecture **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Partha Pratim D. | Technical Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 16, 2024 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** - Offset replays helps to replay events - partitioning helps in multi processing - multi cluster support - ease of use - great community **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** - Learing curve it bit steap - python support is less **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are doing a ETL pipeline and usin kafka to store and forward the events to avoid backpresuure from services ### 14. Kafka: The Ultimate Choice for Event-Driven Architectures **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2025 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Best option when you want to build and control a huge event driven system **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Less performance when you have a auto scaling system **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Decoupling micro service with ddd ### 15. Kafka Review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dhaanish Sahal D. | Software Development Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2024 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka is easy to use and implementation is kafka is easy to understand. It has fault tolerance feature so that there will be no data loss. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Till now I haven't faced any issues, it is good. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka solves handling of large data and maintans reliability. It can integrate with other tools. ### 16. Apache Kafka: Review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dhaanish S. | Software Development Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 12, 2024 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** I love using Kafka because helps me to send the data to streamsets and also store it there itself. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** As of now I haven't faced any issues with this. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Apache kafka helps me to store the data and also produce data to my ETL tools. ### 17. Great experience with Kafka **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sanchit J. | Cloud Support Associate, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2024 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It is open source, fail safe, and easy to use. They also provide training to learn Kafka. You can easily integrate it with your production environment. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** There is nothing that I dislike about it. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** In a distributed system, you can transfer the stream to different microservices using Kafka. Kafka works on the principle of producer and consumer, as long as you can assign a producer and consumer you can process the messages with ease. ### 18. Best Data streaming platform for our data intensive product that can actually scale! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohammad Humayun K. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 28, 2024 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Ease of using Pub-Sub, the Speed at which our data is processed, minimizes latency and integrations. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** A steep learning curve for novices, maintenance is a hassle sometimes, And the fact that it depends on Zookeeper. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** In my company, it's helping me to build real-time data streaming pipelines, It provides good fault-tolerance and throughput. It also allows our microservices to scale independently ensuring things are efficiently distributed for consistency and reliability. ### 19. Kafka for event driven microservices **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sunil D. | Co-Founder, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 02, 2024 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Relaible messaging broker with easy partitioning and replication Client library in all language and framework Ready made connector with almost every well-known databases and datastores ..e.g with mongodb, elastic search **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Dependecy on zookeeper add additional Admin concern(kraft is not migration ready for production) High startup time in ungraceful shutdown **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Acting as a event store for our saas microservices ### 20. A distributed messaging system that offers high performance reliable communication **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mahesh P. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 14, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka is one of the best solutions that provides reliable communication across multiple independent distributed systems, Moreover, This communication is asynchronous which enables us to effectively leverage Kafka in our real-time data processing applications. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Integrating Kafka into the existing applications is a little complex task, as it demands the need of a tech-expert team to actually set up the Kafka infrastructure which eventually adds cost and effort. Also, the adoption of Kafka is not an easy decision to take as it also increases the complexity and maintenance cost of that application. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I needed a robust technological solution to enable reliable communication across several core microservices running my business application. Apache Kafka really proved useful to have seamless asynchronous and reliable message transfers, Even with the increased traffic, Kafka helped me to achieve high-performance data communication across multiple sub-systems ### 21. Very Good **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nilesh B. | Software Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 05, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache kafka is one of best to stream continuous messages. It streams continuousely without interruption. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Only issue is with message ordering if the quantity is too much. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used it to handle messaging my own crm projects. It is very smooth without lagging. Its gets messages without any issue. ### 22. Distributed streaming system with high scalability and high performance **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** K Madhusudan C. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 30, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Its ability to handle high throughput and low latency event streaming. Its partitioning system allows data to be distributed across multiple brokers making it horizontally scalable **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** it lacks built-in security features and is very complex to set up and configure. Also, it consumes too much of resources, especially memory. Message ordering is not guaranteed across multiple partitions. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were using Apache Kafka for streaming events and catalog data along with Spark with some ETL operations. We built the pipeline making it autoscale in data bricks and AWS-managed Kafka cluster ### 23. Kafka for optimizing all the functionality **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** north w. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 16, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka is great when you want to enhance your software system and make it asynchronous. It's like the best most enhanced version of having a queue with partitions that you can leverage. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** So far it's great, documentation is great. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Solving the wait time for the requests and making our microservices more autonomous by having a well distributed system ### 24. No better solution to support huge data streaming **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ranjit Kumar M. | Lead Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It is fault tolerant and has a retention period for playback of undelivered data. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Does not fit every where. It can only be used for huge data streams not for small applications where point to point data tranfer is required. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is zero fault tolerant which means your data is safe. Once you sends data to kafka you get tension free that it will get delivered at any cost. High Retention period. ### 25. Rock solid and dependable system for messaging and streaming use cases **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vaibhav J. | Senior Principal Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 09, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It's a stable product that serves almost all messaging and streaming needs. Various delivery guarantees help developers design different types of systems. Also, it provides clients and other utilities which are easy to use and speed up development. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Sometimes the re-balancing creates problems and makes the system unstable. Also, a few features are missing in the design, available in Apache Pulsar. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** The Security Analytics product used Kafka to park events received from different sensors and stream them in the ingestion pipeline. Also used it as a messaging system to pass general messages/payloads between components. ### 26. Highly Scalable **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shobit A. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 15, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Highly scalable, easy to configure, Highly available, Guarantee sequential processing in a partition, No Data loss **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** debugging the production issues related to data loss, consumer lag, duplicate messages, lost messages **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** notification system, sending notifications to android/ios devices update the end-user about order processing and assignments ### 27. Kafka is one of the Best Open Messaging due **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Durgesh P. | Technical Lead - Cloud & DevOps Practice, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka have the good platform support, also its adopibility make easy to get the community presence **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** There are few techical complexity like introducing zookeeper which bring some more understanding from business can be solved by simpler architecture **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** As MQ we used to consume the data and push to the streaming application to process these data in Hadoop ### 28. The best pubsub for both cloud and on premise **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consulting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 12, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Powerful Feature rich Flexible design Can work both cloud and on premise **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I can hardly think any , it's the best pubsub I have found **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Seamless collaboration for all my products using IOT ### 29. best fast & distributed streaming service **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Martand S. | Senior Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 11, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** the best features of kafka are scalability &durability. it is fault tolerance so even if something bad goes, kafka manages itself. We do not have write logics to prevent data loss. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I would say dislike. it is more of a limitation, kafka is purely programming based. As a programmer I find it manageable but for a non-programming background person it can be a bit challenge to learn Java code. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am working with a large insurance company which deals in more than 20 countries. so we use kafka for order processing system. We are using streaming data pipelines to integrate kafka with databricks to maintain data warehouse & datamarts. ### 30. Distributed real time messaging system **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 12, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Support pub-sup. Pipeline streaming, many connectors **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Difficult to achieve atomic principles like transaction. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Highly scaled real time data processing, Data sync with other system ### 31. Easy to use and integrate **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shivraj K. | Software development engineer 2, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 21, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka provides out-of-the-box integration with any programming language, preferably java, and multiple subsequent versions of Kafka solve multiple old problems, making it easy to integrate for data streaming. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** The kafka docs needs to be improve such that any new developer can use this easily and any enhancement in version should be clearly mention in docs to avoid here and there searching. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Apache Kafka helps consume a large set of data and analyse the data to obtain the desired result; the broker feature in Kafka is highly reliable and scalable. Apache Kafka helps in streaming large sets of data. ### 32. Best Product for Event Driven Architecture **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paranjothi M. | Documentation, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Scalable, accountable, easy to upgrade the security, and easy to maintain the product by own, one message - multiple consumers and UI for checking the message commit **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Need configuration for a different version and easy-to-understand document for new users and events to be organized in major cities like Bangalore. Share the knowledge to users **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Event streaming and Message Queue, I used this mostly for message queue because not to lose the events and have to be more scalable based on the message I receive. ### 33. Kafka message broker is awesome **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** John J. | Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Latency is very low and it's good to use. Kafka is a very good tool if someone is looking for message broker to use please go for it then you will come to know why I'm posting it. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Sometimes Kafka throws some errors in the Kafka portal gui and even if they throw error it's easy to find the room cause of the issue and we can fix it as quickly as possible. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Apache Kafka broker is again one of the good tool and not sure wheather we can replace it with any other services so far I feel one of the good tool to use for message broker. ### 34. Apache Kafka at scale **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The overall community around Kafka is pretty well established. There are tons of existing open source project that enhance the use cases that just Kafka alone does not provide. Things like celery or flower have integrations for most queues but most projects often start off with Kafka as their primary queue. It's easy to manage at scale. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** One of the use cases where Kafka fails is Exactly once transmission of messages. AWS SQS provides this and is highly competent at that. This is not a very big issue but having two different queues in the same service becomes confusing at times. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Apache Kafka works as a message broker and allows us to process messages asynchronously. This helps us save cost. Provide better response times. At the same time, a self hosted Kafka turns out cheaper than most alternatives at scale. ### 35. Best stream processing technology **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 30, 2023 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Durable and robust. Easy to use with support of many languages **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Sometimes it become hard to implement in python **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is solving problem of message queue with distributed processing ### 36. Apache Kafka is good, but not always needed **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Geras G. | Team Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It's good for keeping queue messages always or for some period. You can use Apache Kafka for big projects where you want to store your messages (actions) and want to come to it later and analyze your data. I recommend it to use in Event Sourcing architecture where your source of truth is Kafka messages. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** It's hard to manage, The price of Apache. Kafka service is not cheap, if your application needs to have some messaging to transfer some data you need to think about some cloud simple queue messages if it works for you then I recommend using RabidMQ, Amazon Sqs, or Google PubSub **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Apache Kafka was originally used to move messages between systems with very high throughput. Kafka is considered to be in the class of applications known as message-oriented middleware. Kafka has several key responsibilities: decouples producer applications from consumers, makes data a first-class citizen in an organization, an enabler for event-driven applications, and facilitates the real-time processing of unbounded data streams. ### 37. Kafka in retail at scale **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amit P. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 27, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Speed at which it transmits and ability to handle a large number of messages seamlessly. I have used it in scenarios where millions of data were to be communicated between microservices and kafka is able to handle it very well. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** No inbuilt retry mechanisms, like after consuming if the server isn't able to process the request and throughs exception, we manually do the retries by putting the same message in the queue again and again. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Major problem that I see kafka is solving is for microservices interaction. Instead of api calls between multiple microservices we use kafka and it helps in parallel processing too. Thus enabling faster responses. ### 38. Kafka - Best Messaging Pub/Sub Streaming Storage Service **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Malathi M. | Programmer Analyst Executive, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 15, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Low latency - milliseconds & throughtput Decoupling layer Unlimited retention Asynchronous Kafka's different semantics & latest exactly once guarantee Fault tolerance HA through replication Kafka connect connectors integrations Kstreams topic-topic transforms KSQL streaming SQL real-time analytics **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Ordering issues on late arrival Data Compression & decompression slows performance in AVRO Full-fledged Kafka monitoring tool - we need confluent Kafka for this Setting up the cluster & management, even though coordinating & maintenance done by the zookeeper Provisioned throughput error, retires,& exception issues if not properly taken care **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka acts as a streaming pub/sub layer to pump the CDC event change data published from on-prem database events to GCP cloud. Benefited by SLA, performance - ms latency for data streaming & processing solution Kafka can be used as long-term storage which can be used for BATCH ETL downstream operations as well. Replication & fault tolerance Asynchronous ### 39. its onr of best video streaming plstform **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vaibhav P. | Site Reliability Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It is swift and its easy to use, The analytics is very dynamic to get information in real-time.Lightning Fast In-Memory Cluster Computing Framework Cluster to distribute large data of calculation. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Optimization could be difficult to do as its not happening automatically, not best when we have multiple users. There could be issues with the File management and with the small files. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helping with streaming platform and analytics part is handled dynamically ### 40. Apache Kafka is publish-subscribe based fault tolerant messaging system with good community. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** vivek K. | Software Development Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The best Benefit I like about apche kafka . Kafka is designed for distributed high throughput system.It is best messaging broker in the market. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** It doesn't have good set of monitoring tools.it doesn't support wildcards topic and some time it sucks when the size of queue increase . **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is basically used for sending message in publish subscribe messaging system.and it is ofline and online based message consumption. ### 41. I used Apache Kafka to support real time connection for IoT devices **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mustafa R. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 15, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** They're a lot of SDK libraries for easy integration and starting your logic and they're a lot of docs over the internet to get started, and The community is big enough to solve your issues. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** The Way as a developer handles the configurations It seems too hard to handle configurations from being and the error messages hard to detect issues come from what. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us to provide real-time data in an efficient way. ### 42. Stream corporate events with ease and save on travel costs **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sean S. | Business Development, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** We have integrated this with a few other systems, and streamed some pretty large corporate events to staff working remotely. It has worked very well and allowed us to reach a large number of staff without having to organize travel to a centralized location **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** We have had some lag on occasion, but there is the chance that was due to internet connectivity rather than Apache Kafka itself **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're creating virtual corporate events that break down attendance barriers and bring our staff together. ### 43. Awesome experience using kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Swagat S. | Product Tech Advisor , Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka is the most powerful and scalable streaming framework on the market. We have used Apache Kafka as a part of many real-time analytics solutions. It has a great performance [and is] easy to integrate with big data technologies like Spark. Due to its distributed nature, Apache Kafka is capable of operating very quickly and can handle millions of messages every second. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I didn't find anything as such. I didn't find anything to dislike. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Real time streaming Performance Scalability ### 44. Apache Kafka - Simple, Easy to Use And Super Fast **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chirag T. | Technical Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka is not only a messaging platform, but it works for streaming(KStreams), database querying (KSQL), Offset management etc. Unlike traditional messaging platform, it is a publisher subscriber based messaging platform. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Nothing. It's the best messaging product that I have ever used in my software career. Would like to just highlight one point wherein if Kafka's dependency with Zookeeper could be removed, that would be the biggest and greatest achievement for Kafka to make it independent. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Kafka should be considered as a goto tool for any messaging platform requirements considering the number of advantages it has. Some being like Easy integration with multiple programming languages, stream processing, distributed data storage, capacity to handle multiple requests at same point of time, etc. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1) Event Streaming in Real and Near Real Time 2) Producer-Consumer message flow 3) Publisher Subscriber model gives more flexibility to producer and consumer applications to have better control over the flow of data. 4) Kafka Integration with Databases, Middleware applications, Front End applications ### 45. Simply the most reliable tool in the market **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 06, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka offers the best Message Queueing system,having it as an open source library really helps in grasping the ins and outs of the program, I have worked with various different MQs and Apache Kafka is one of the best out there **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** One thing I have noticed about Apache Kafka is the lack of monitoring tools. Another thing I dislike, however, some people tend to like it is that it has too many options and sometimes can be deemed complex to use **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am currently using Apache Kafka as a Message Queue in a Micro-services architecture and it has helped so much in the implementation of the system ### 46. Devops Engineer **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** hammoudai a. | Devops Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 03, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It's a nice web service that it enables me to host my website on any server **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Is a little bit hard to use, but i have to solve this problem **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can deploy my website on any server using Apache ### 47. I am a software developer of 3 years of experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 27, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** without Resorting A B to complex rounting with maximum throughput and it is best for storing, reading, re-reading, and analyzing streaming data. It’s ideal for routinely audited systems or that store their messages permanently. Breaking it down even further, Kafka shines with real-time processing and analyzing data. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Apache kafka is not having complete set of monitoring tools and managing tools so it makes difficulty while analyzing so small tech can not rely on it much and new broker can produce issue. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** basically using apache kafka system can be scalable and service can communicate independently and itbis also allowing to take gist of data for better understanding of system ### 48. Best for real time analytics **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 08, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It is good for messaging storing processing both real time and historical data. It is an ideal choice for real time event processing system like retail application Good part is It's free and getting high quality support And its scalable reliable and open source message streaming tool **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** If we don't consume data for a long time, it will vanish from there. Data will be safe but only for short time. And its not a good choice for safety critic systems like medical systems Begginers find it difficult to understand Kafka concepts as it is vast It don't have full support for monitoring and management tools **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves real life message streaming efficienctly. So we won't miss any event when service down due to unavoidable situations. It handles large amount of data simultaneously. ### 49. Apache Kafka My Understanding. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vishal P. | SSE II, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Its real-time processing and sequential processing expectations are one thing that is required and not present in AWS SQS. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** The Strict tie-up of consumers with the partitions. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have required strict time-based processing where we have used Kafka. ### 50. Amazing product **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 04, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka is particularly valuable in scenarios requiring real-time data processing and application activity tracking, as well as for monitoring purposes. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka does not contain a complete set of monitoring as well as managing tools. Thus, new startups or enterprises fear to work with Kafka. Message tweaking issues: The Kafka broker uses system calls to deliver messages to the consumer. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka is particularly valuable in scenarios requiring real-time data processing and application activity tracking, as well as for monitoring purposes. ## Apache Kafka Discussions - [What is the maximum limit of the number of partitions in a Kafka topic?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/26572-what-is-the-maximum-limit-of-the-number-of-partitions-in-a-kafka-topic) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What is Apache Kafka used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/apache-kafka-what-is-apache-kafka-used-for) - 1 comment - [What is Apache Kafka used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-apache-kafka-used-for) - 2 comments - [View Apache Kafka pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-kafka/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-04+09%3A21%3A50+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=bbade0b1-b0a7-414d-bf2c-5847e14b58d3&secure%5Btoken%5D=b64def66c6fcfb6c4c14acaf7471c9416cb1d04e0757017a8474672c92b3d55d&format=llm_user) ## Apache Kafka Integrations - [Apache Beam](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-beam/reviews) - [Elasticsearch](https://www.g2.com/products/elastic-elasticsearch/reviews) - [Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)](https://www.g2.com/products/google-kubernetes-engine-gke/reviews) - [Grafana Labs](https://www.g2.com/products/grafana-labs/reviews) - [ICEBERG](https://www.g2.com/products/iceberg/reviews) - [PostgreSQL](https://www.g2.com/products/postgresql/reviews) - [Prometheus](https://www.g2.com/products/prometheus/reviews) ## Apache Kafka Features **Data** - Data Processing - Data Sources - Integration - Real-Time Processing **Functionality** - Asynchronous Messaging - Language Support - Cloud-based Messaging - Latency **Analytics** - Reporting & Analytics **Integration** - Application Integration - Data Integration - Plugins and integrations **Management** - Policies and Controls - Security Monitoring - Activity Monitoring **Agentic AI - Message Queue (MQ)** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Proactive Assistance **Building Reports** - Data Transformation - Data Modeling - WYSIWYG Report Design - Integration APIs **Platform** - Mobile User Support - Customization - User, Role, and Access Management - Internationalization - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications ## Top Apache Kafka Alternatives - [Confluent](https://www.g2.com/products/confluent/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (111 reviews) - [Google Cloud Pub/Sub](https://www.g2.com/products/google-cloud-pub-sub/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (34 reviews) - [MuleSoft Anypoint Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/mulesoft-anypoint-platform/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (630 reviews)