--- title: Apache Kafka Reviews meta_title: 'Apache Kafka Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 132 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Apache Kafka works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.5 review_count: 132 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-17' parent_category: name: Big Data url: https://www.g2.com/categories/big-data --- # 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:** 132 ## 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 highlight the **high scalability** of Apache Kafka, making it perfect for growing data volumes in enterprises. (5 reviews) - Users value the **real-time data processing** of Apache Kafka, appreciating its speed, scalability, and reliability across systems. (3 reviews) - Users appreciate the **easy integrations** of Apache Kafka, enjoying seamless connections with their Java applications. (2 reviews) - Users praise the **high scalability and performance** of Apache Kafka, making it perfect for handling large data volumes. (2 reviews) - Users value the **high scalability and performance** of Apache Kafka, making it perfect for handling growing data 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) - 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 struggle with the **operational complexity** of Apache Kafka, which increases resource consumption and limits message queuing capabilities. (1 reviews) - Users find the **data management issues** overwhelming, especially smaller teams needing dedicated expertise for maintenance and scaling. (1 reviews) - Users find that **debugging issues** in Apache Kafka can be challenging and requires significant effort to resolve. (1 reviews) - Users find the **difficult learning curve** of Apache Kafka overwhelming, especially for smaller teams needing dedicated expertise. (1 reviews) - Users find the **limited customization** in Apache Kafka challenging, particularly during 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. 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. ### 2. Best open-source processing platform **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sarthak A. | Software QA Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 07, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Open Source so its reliable and I can customise it to meet my org's requirements **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** The UI and initial setup is a bit tedious compared to the other paid platforms **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Processing times can be variable depending on the data loads ### 3. Event Processing using Kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rahul S. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 11, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Easily able to integrate with python and Java **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I don't see community page of Kafka that strong. Sometimes if you are struck, you need to solve on own. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Apache Kafka is really good to capture events in db in almost real time. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps me in event Processing as well creating analytics platform. ### 4. By using apache Kayla we were able to achieve the functionality we were looking for. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Samyog G. | Associate Lead Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 18, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Smooth communication between the microservices by using the kafka service. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** In ability to have persistent message in case of breakage of communication between the services in my usecase. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** By using apache Kayla we were able to achieve the functionality we were looking for. ### 5. Good one **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shiva Shankara V. | Advanced Application Engineering Senior Analyst , Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Scalable,fault-tolerant,publish-subscribe messaging which helps us building distributed applications **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I don't see any as of now. Will surely let you know if I find any **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Activity tracking, real time data processing, messaging,log aggregation ### 6. Distributed Messaging tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 04, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The best part is the architecture. It is really easy to understand how Kafka works. Also the support with multiple frameworks. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Might it will be easy if Kafka provides some UI-based tool that can help to debug data inside the Kafka topic. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** If you have a very large amount of data and you need some message broker then you can easily go ahead with Kafka. It is really easy to understand and also has mature APIs. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were building one near real-time data lake for that we were getting transaction data. So those messages come to Kafka and we wrote one consumer application that processes the data. ### 7. Apache kafka is very stable and ver useful in day to day software engineering **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Message queuing is the best and most used features which ensures message loss are not there. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Lack of monitoring tool makes kafka sometimes frustating. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is solving many problems like safety and surety of my message delivery, breaking large treads into pieces. ### 8. Inter api communication.. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 12, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Easy to use interface and ability to communicate across multiple api's fulfilling many business requirements. Topic creation is made easy and very much efficient. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Topicd could have been birectional which can help communicate both frontwards and backwards. Much more friendly ui expected though the current ui is good and does the job. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helps with cross communication among multiple api's to handle events and send responses necessary to deal with the events. Error or application breakdown prevented with recorded events. ### 9. Review for Apache Kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Deep T. | Senior Legal Recruiter, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 15, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** As an open-source real-time event streaming platform, I liked that it is very efficient and with the right training easy to set up and use. Specifically designed to handle a high volume of data so it is reliable and stable. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** For a small volume of data, it is not recommended to use. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It increases productivity. ### 10. One of the best open source distributed event streaming platform **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Multiple subscribers is better option which is not available in many messaging services. It combines messaging, storage, stream processing,etc **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** More reliable on command line. UI based are not that much easier. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Nothing **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Build real time streaming data pipelines. Easy to configure with other platforms like java ### 11. Review for Apache Kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Deepankar T. | Senior Legal Recruiter, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 20, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It is best tool for data integration and capable of operating very quickly. It can transfer large amount of data very efficiently. Easily configurable. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Need a dashboard to monitor performance. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** One can store data for a while and then can process. It really works well. ### 12. Standard tool for Data Streaming **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kubendra Reddy M. | Data Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Best thing about kafka is its scalability, resilient, low latency. Its parallel processing make the consumers to pull millions of records within seconds. Topics can be partitioned for better parallelism. We can even check the topic data and offset to check where we currently streaming. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Nothing it is perfect for streaming applications. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Standard data streaming tool go for it. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used kafka to manage millions of records that we are getting from web and mobiles sources and mongo database as consumer. Kafka made our jobs easy and standard. ### 13. The Perfect Message Broker **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vinod G. | Sr Research Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Very High Throughput and fail-safe broker **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Does not contain a complete set of monitoring tools! **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** For real-time Stream Analysis and High throughput: 1)Sequnetional IO 2)Zero Copy 3)Compression 3)Queuing Structure **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Streaming Analysis, as well as Message Queuing of real-time data of high volume, results in the elimination of Storage based systems thereby saving lots of costs! ### 14. Kafka is the best streaming framework I have ever used. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Samar S. | Associate Data Scientist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 31, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** There are a couple of things I love about Kafka, mentioned below: 1. Easy to use & adapt. 2. Great community support. 3. Great speeds of message sharing. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** There's nothing so far that I dislike about Kafka. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** In my present organization, Kafka allows multiple apps/services to share information flawlessly. Our data science team produces Kafka messages that are then consumed by the engineering team, thus helping us share information without missing a beat. ### 15. Apache kafka performance review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jasmeet singh V. | Software Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 25, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It's event size is 1mb and it's very good, generally event services are used to send small data, the connectors are widely available like Apache sink, mongodb etc. It help the producing or consumer life cycle fully automated. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Apache is an open source so for the beginners it's not so friendly and also for the connectors also, companies like confluent are capturing the market which is paid one. So if more option should be available in terms of connector & other tools which are related to it **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** We don't have any better message processing system other than kafka. We can surely rely on it to handle from large to small size of data, we have nothing the options like sync manner or async manner. We can create topic with parallel processing so that our data will be divided and send faster with topic partitioning. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have 5 micro service and all are interchanging their data from kafka itself, It's the solely message transfer software we are using for all purposes like notification, enrichment data, poller services like cronjobs. From small to large size of data. Its like one man army. ### 16. Apache kafka is really a very good thing in the IT industry. It make life easy for the developers. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The most like thing of Apache Kafka is it can handle millions of records with a very high throughput with Zero data loss. Its have a very Low latency and it is scalable. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** In my view, it is complete software in itself. As I am using Apache Kafka for more than 2 years of my carrier I found it is a very nice thing for developers. So everyone like it with Zero haters **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Hey Guys try to use Apache Kafka it resolve your many issues and you can easily handle all your streaming issues **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We resolve ETL problems using Kafka and we can easily dump our millions of records into our data lake for further processing using Kafka, It helps us to resolve many issues faced with old techniques ### 17. A good stream-processing software **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The event streaming process is so smooth. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Sometimes we have issues with loading the tools while working with large files. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We can easily connect to external systems and helps in stream processing applications. ### 18. Most valuable Streaming platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nayan S. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 07, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka provides a mechanism to replay messages if our infrastructure loses data. This tool can be used as an application log collector. Real-time data processing. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** A comprehensive set of monitoring tools is not available to the user. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** You should use Apache Kafka when you require a messaging system that can provide higher ordering guarantees. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used Apache Kafka for several reasons, and that allowed us to simplify operational monitoring and exception tracking with core microservices of the web application. Messages are retained by Kafka for a length of time after they have been consumed. Kafka allows consumers to fetch messages (pulling). Because of its architecture, it may be expanded horizontally by adding more nodes. Businesses now rely more and more on real-time data analysis to obtain faster insights and respond faster, Apache Kafka is the best choice for them. ### 19. Beyond messaging queue **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Savan S. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 10, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka is the best scalable, reliable, robust, and open-sourced messaging streaming tool. Multiple subscribers consume the single-time published information via the publisher-subscriber concept. Also, Apache Kafka is highly configurable. To configure any setting, we need to add the property key and value within the property file of Kafka Broker or Kafka Consumer, or Kafka Publisher, that's it. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka is much powerful and valuable tool. The features provided by this tool are beyond our expectations so, as far as I could not find anything to dislike specific to Apache Kafka. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Apache Kafka is one of the excellent data streaming and messaging queue. Also, this tool is highly configurable. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We required an asynchronous way of communication with our other services deployed in our microservice infrastructure, but we had to store messages after published for a short-term period. Also, the partition mechanism allowed us the parallel consumption of our messages, which has significantly increased the efficiency of our services. ### 20. Kafka Integration **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hitesh A. | Senior Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka integrate with hundreds event sources **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Data Transformation on fly, Data Retention, Topic Rebalancing **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka integration with Duckcreek Insurance product ### 21. Kafka - The data streaming broker **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jimesh S. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 13, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** We used Apache Kafka as a data streaming tool which has helped us to develop loosely coupled architecture and allowed us to make asynchronized communication between multiple services. Moreover, its partitioning feature has incredibly increased the efficiency of our application. We integrated Kafka with Avro to serialize and deserialize our data and validate it as well. It was quite easy to integrate with 3rd party tool. Kafka has great documentation large user group so we easily get community support. Eventually, I can say that Apache Kafka is an easy to configure, versatile, speedy and low latency tool. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** It is a highly configurable and feature-rich tool hence, I could not find anything to dislike in Apache Kafka. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Apache Kafka is not only the messaging broker but it provides a myriad of features, before choosing any other Messaging Broker please have a look at the features provided by Apache Kafka. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had to develop loosely coupled services so, downtime of one service should not affect the others. Furthermore, we needed to interact seamlessly with any service and also considered speed and performance. Also, we had to openly available Kafka Server so, authentication/authorization was also required, but we really thankful to Kafka documentation which made our story very easy. ### 22. Best messaging Queue **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akash K. | Senior Associate Level-1, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 12, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Very low latency, Highly scalable Distributed system Highly Reliable Highly Durable Pull based Streams **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Kafka does not have a monitoring tool like other stream systems do. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** It's the most widely used and highly supported community. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Asynchronous communication between microservices Messaging Queue for sending a message ### 23. Apache kafka for streaming data **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** KanuPriya K. | Product Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 11, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** What i liked the most about kafka is it provides highly structured way to aquire data in real time from source syetem. And it is highly reliable and secure. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** What i don't like about Apache kafka is there is not much transformation i am able to perform before i store the data in destination systems. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using Apache kafka for processing the data from source system and creating the pipeline. Created kafka producer and consumer. It provides the robustness pipeline for processing the data. ### 24. Stream your data with Apache Kafka **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 12, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It is the best software available to stream data over the Internet. Its seamless integration with other free software allows you to build a complete stack to handle huge amounts of data. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Integration with multiple programming languages could be improved. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Kafka to stream monitoring data from industrial equipment to a database. This strategy allows me to persist data and use it for data analytics. ### 25. The King of Messaging Systems **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sefi B. | Team lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 31, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka is simple, fast, and reliable. It can be used in so many **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** It's not easy to query the data inside kafka **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Integration between microservices. Stream processing and data pipelines ### 26. kafka features **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Venkata M. | Enterprise Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 10, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** connector framework and loosely coupled integration with fault-tolerance **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** developer friendly UI feature is missing **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** decouple the systems to provide independency ### 27. Highly recommended **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Topics, easily testable, consumers and publishers, easily integrate with spring boot **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** My experience with Kafka was excellent. I didn't have any issues. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Retrieve data/logs and do filtering ### 28. It is outstanding message broker for inside work. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aleksei J. | Java Software Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 03, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka provides service to emit data between producer and consumer inside the system. It is very helpful in case of asynchronous operations when necessary to wait until remote devices returns response. It works very fast and scalable thanks to parallel calculation depends on numbers of CPU cores. Queue system is the wonderful idea. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Rebalancing takes a lot of time when the node becomes unavailable or restart, so Kafka waits until primary partitions relaunch. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Nice to have the debugging tools - it helps me a lot during development. Kafka is a nice message broker to be used in microservices. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka allows to get a lot of logs to be analyzed, we need to setup them to avoid get this mess. ### 29. Always reliable **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhijeet A. | Senior Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 08, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** What do I like best: Reliability and Fault Tolerance **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I think sometimes it's difficult to find the skewed topics **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Stream click events on all channels ### 30. Reliable and blazing fast message queue **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dhanish M. | Research Associate II, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 16, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The ease of use as well as the number of various options that can be configured. It is also modular which allows you to plug in modules to increase functionality. It is well supported by the community with lots of help available when stuck. Its also available as Docker images to make installation very easy. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** The configuration options sometimes can get confusing and the documentation although very good is sometimes hard to follow. Ensuring a configuration is correct and working as expected is not trivial as it is a network application and requires many clients to test it out. Adding extra modules might not make clients work correctly. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using it as a distributed messaging system to share cyber threat events in real time. Benefits are that its open source and free to use, extremely reliable and fault tolerant making updates to network security trust-able and reliable. The added OAuth2 modules help in keeping the cluster secure and trustworthy. ### 31. scalable data streaming **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** YOGESH B. | Mr, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2019 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** scalable data is partitioned brokered stable versions of kafka enables to upgrade the kafka at any time Kafka parallelism at the topic level is very useful to achieve performance and scale to million requests per second kafka has provided very well defined storage management, it provides many options to configure them by size & by time **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** load balancing requires all ips to be known by producer When the kafka is hosted in any on prem environment, usually users does not want to expose all three ip address due to seccurity concerns. But kafka client needs all ip addresses of kafka cluster to load balance Load time of the data when any node restart is huge when we have large data in kafka before restart when one node goes down in cluster, it takes lot of time to rebalance **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** its a good platform for streaming your data in huge it's easily scalable. Only issue when you start scaling is you have to mannually rebalance the partitions when you add a node or delete any existing nodes be careful about systems when restarts are frequent because it takes considerable time to restart, how ever it is the best solution you can get among all opensource solutions available Anthor aspect worth considering is its parallelism level, kafka is having pull mechanism to read the messages, partitins are per consumer, so it provides parallelsim at partitions level **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** data streaming from different IOT devices to processing engine, storm is connected to kafka and used to process and store in elastic search we also stream logs with the system, events with in the system. we also log from various devices, these logs are huge in number. almost millions for second. ### 32. Best Streaming Queue/Topic **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yogesh B. | Technical Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 07, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka is known the best streaming platform, it has the capability to handle data in pull mechanism makes it highly performant. Kafka provides capabilities to segregate data via topics, it supports binary data and text data. It has the capability to distribute data to partitions, a notion of shards Kafka has consumer - kafka streams which is built on the principles of kafka to give better performance we considered replacing storm with kafka streams and could achieve all the required functionalities kafka provides various tune ups to achieve HA **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** One thing I observed is we can not switch off replication in multi node setup. suppose say i want only load distribution but its okay if i lose data. I dont want any replication. If any partition assigned node goes down, kafka should identify and reassign the partitions at some point to other nodes instead it goes on toss expecting isr to be available another point is when any node goes down it takes a while to reassign the primary partitions and make kafka available, though config is there to set the time to trigger rebalancing, usually it kicks the rebalancing but the rebalancing itself takes lot of time **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Its a great tool with high performance and millisecond level latency Has got lot of debugging tools **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** streaming logs/stats from multiple devices and consumed by processing engine ### 33. A better messaging and streaming service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lakshmi Narayana J. | Senior Hadoop Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 12, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The nature of message streaming is guaranteed to all consumers who subscribed and good thing is the message will never missed which guarantees data delivery **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** No issues with Kafka in terms of topics and streaming and couldn’t any drawbacks **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** I suggest Kafka for businesses for guaranteed delivery of data to consumers **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Topics and streaming ### 34. Kafka for ETL **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sahil M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 22, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The way we can scale it, as opposed to rabbitmq, the persistent intermediate storage with ksql, and paralleling data by topics **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** The official sink and source connectors, from debezium have issues with some advanced data types, especially arrays and son, when reading from postgres WAL files. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Make sure first do a proper research for your use case, when implementing Kafka clusters, as it is an open-source software there might be things partially implemented and may not have support for specific requirements, a person in the team who can do some open-source contributions to manage the caveats would definitely help. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We did not use it for ETL, but are continuously using it as an advanced messaging broker for our microservices, with much detailed information available to us about data movement in the data bus, as it makes handling failure a lot easy ### 35. Apache Kafka is the answer for all your communication problems. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Digvijay S. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 25, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka is a very fast and scalable messaging system. I used it for all the microservices asynchronous communication channels. It is extremely easy to setup and configure according to your needs. It also has sdks to help using it with wide range of technology stack. It also has a central broker which governs the master instance and takes care of failure and scaling. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** The fact that it broker is not inbuilt and requires zookeper. But its not a dealbreaker. Also that you do not have a dedicated gui for tracking and maintenance purposes. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** It is an extremely easy to setup and start using kind of a tool. If you are looking for fast, durable and highly scalable messaging queue to start start development, this is it. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used apache kafka for developing message driven asyc communication for microservices architecture. I also used it as a logging server as it provides a store to save messages for prescribed time. ### 36. Advanced many-to-many streaming platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Civic & Social Organization | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** I like the simplicity of setup of Kafka broker in cluster mode. It permits to have a three powerful Kafka brokers by using even a single virtual low cost machine. The interaction with the cluster is quite simple and you can customize the topics functionalities by setting replication factors and main copy broker. I like also the flexibility of Kafka. It can be used for managing high quantity of messages from multiple sensors, but also to stream a single big video to multiple subscribers. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I have not found anything that I dislike until now. Maybe the confluent support can be improved, since they offer only support for payed Confluent licenses and not for on-premises Kafka installation. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Kafka is really complete and permits to connect several producers with many customers. It is quite simple to be installed and the resource consumption is quite small. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can share messages with many subscribers. I can gather data from a multiplicity of sensors. I can scale up horizontally with low cost machines. ### 37. Robust big data message broker **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Atul S K. | VP Engineering for Emerging Technologies, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 23, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Very fast messaging platform - consumer groups are a great feature - So is replication. Kafka streams are fantastic. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Whatever I have used worked well. Some more standard monitoring tools should be part of the basic setup. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** The confluent team has done a great job of documenting kafka. They also have a great toolbox built atop the main Apache Kafka distribution. For beginners, this could ease up the journey a lot. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Kafka as an integration layer component - for doing payments reconciliation - and as a message broker backbone for out micro-services based architecture. Real-time demands are easy to do with Kafka. There is great framework support for streaming applications - we use AlpAkka and Kafka streams for integration - and it works wonderfully. ### 38. Best tool for asynchronous communication **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akib A. | Technical Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 25, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Ability to use kafka as database, capability to handle large volume of data efficiently. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Very less monitoring tools , not all the scripts available for monitoring. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using it extensively in our product, we are using it as messaging system and database both. We’re indexing our catalog data using kafka, sending data to our production environment using topics, importing data from external system over topics. ### 39. Scalable and Reliable **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 23, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Consumer group is one of my favourite feature which let multiple consumers to consume at the same time but avoid reading duplicates. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** It’s highly configurable, I mean with configuration settings we can manage Kafka. This is both good and bad. It’s really easy to set up, but if we miss something, we get screwed. One good example: Our Kafka consumer will not poll until it process all the currently running jobs. In this case the running jobs takes up to an hour. So, Kafka consumer will not do any activities for an hour. In this case, zookeeper assumes my Kafka consumer died and recreates the new one and read the same message which processed already. This was finally a confit settings **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Go through the configuration option documentation **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Message broker which collects all the message from different source and my consumer groups will receive one by one and process it ### 40. Kafka stream processing at your finger tips **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Martin A. | IT Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 26, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** We were looking for an open-source solution to perform stream processing. When our team found this, it was immediately accepted to be used as our permanent solution to achieve the goal we had. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** We haven't found any issues so far in Kafka. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Open-Source, Stable and Scalable platform to all your difficult problems. You don't have to search elsewhere when you have Kafka **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** This forum is not the right place to discuss problem statement solved with our clients ### 41. Review Kafka **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Varun K. | Senior Technical Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 30, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Low Latency , High Through put and replication **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Apache Kafka does not support wildcard topic selection. Instead, it matches only the exact topic name. It is because selecting wildcard topics make it incapable to address certain use cases. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** For making progress async Kafka is good tool. In message queue, Kafka is popular in industry. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Queue system for sms. ### 42. Apache kafka for Real time data **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 20, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** It supports a new era of real time architecture and reducing the wait time in data availability. Also, its a very trending hot topic now a days so definitely it's easier to get helpful documents that may help during integration with our application. With above it is distributed, consumer friendly, batch handling capability etc. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I dislike most about it is lack of complete set of monitoring and management tools. Also message tweakings may reduce its performance. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use to store all booked information over queue with payment information that are baically consumed through overnight jobs by different system. ### 43. Great tool to build event based systems **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shivam A. | Software Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 25, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Scalability and reliability of the product is impressive **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Dynamically changing of partition is feature that i am expecting and it is not there . This is a thing that i dislike . Moreover documentation can be improved **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am ising kafka a s an event based stream queue to trigger my workes to start Ml based predictions ### 44. A powerful tool for message brokerage!!! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sibaprasad T. | Senior Engineer Devops, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 25, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Firstly being used old age solutions like IBM MQ nand Message Broker I must say it's mush easier to use plus it's dynamic with vast ecosystem of connectors. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** The product support can be slightly better. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are streaming data real time from a transaction system to various back end systems that needed that data. ### 45. Kafka : A high capacity component **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Swapnil G. | Technical Specialist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 23, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** High throughput, Multi-instance, Kafka Connect API **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Confluent's version of Kafka because the UI is too bad. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Use only HDP's version of Kafka. The confluent one is a bit messy. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Performing Spark streaming using Apache Kafka Connect API. ### 46. I used apache kafka in our queuing engine for sending messages in microservices architecture. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 23, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The best thing about apache kafka is its index maintainable structure. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** I didn’t find any within my requirement. Just that if I could get 247 support for best installation and runtime problems. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reducing all my cpu tasks to queue workers which makes my application lite. Also many workers can use the same message which is best. ### 47. Backend software engineer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 21, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** The most fastest message broker and stable solution. **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** If you have monitoring tool for topic, it would be better. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Every data is in Kafka and make the data pipeline with Spark. ### 48. Java developer, work with microservices and kafka **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Logistics and Supply Chain | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 20, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Kafka keep the messages for a period time **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Some minor errors that hard to understand **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** It's easy to use. **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka help to keep track the history of events, when the service down and don't lost any events. ### 49. You first and last message queue **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 28, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Clean design and doc, big open source community **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Hard to debug problems sometimes and performance issue **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Distribute log collector, message queue ### 50. Great product must for modern integrations **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** vivek s. | Principal Application Developer, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2018 **What do you like best about Apache Kafka?** Fast , redundancy Scalable Publisher subscriber based Replaces ETL Support in industry Industry standard **What do you dislike about Apache Kafka?** Learning curve is high Concept needs deep understanding Debug capability’s Error handling is obscure **Recommendations to others considering Apache Kafka:** Great product Scalable Kafka streams rocks **What problems is Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Replacing ETL and batch processing Log aggregation ## 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?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-18+20%3A52%3A05+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=ebdf86b0-ffa8-4d0e-aae0-306f2fb4812e&secure%5Btoken%5D=9cf62e38fde18969a01eebb9624de4c18029285b96298d7d486426d5a0506aa8&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 (656 reviews)