--- title: Apache Karaf Reviews meta_title: 'Apache Karaf Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 24 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Apache Karaf works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.2 review_count: 24 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-15' parent_category: name: Containerization url: https://www.g2.com/categories/containerization --- # Apache Karaf Reviews **Vendor:** The Apache Software Foundation **Category:** [Runtime Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/runtime) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 24 ## About Apache Karaf Apache Karaf provides dual polymorphic container and application bootstrapping paradigms to the Enterprise. ## Apache Karaf Reviews ### 1. Best Data Stream Platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mithilesh kumar r. | Freelancer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 16, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Easy for software development. Less code does much work also, Deployment process of a batch applications was very simple in Apache Karaf even in the Clustered Environment. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Nothing to dislike, but all the time need to compile if changes have been made. One more thing, Need to improve the cloud api call in order to update configuration and properties. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** Its Best use it without any hesitation. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1 Wrapping normal jar helps to embedded as a bundle. 2 Installing lucene dependencies as a feathers part, I was able to work on search on my application freely.veda ### 2. Apache karaf enterprise ready platform **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jayanth T. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 24, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** It gives Unix like console, dynamic configuration, advanced logging where slf4j, log4j etc frameworks can be used. It provides complete security framework and role based access control. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Nothing to dislike but the UI can be improved with latest technologies so it would be more user friendly. It sometimes crashes, so maybe they can look up to things help it run seamlessly. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** It's an excellent application to use and promote business growth. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps in easy deployment, centralized logging which is flexible in using different logging frameworks. It's used for monitoring and electing. This helped in increasing my business performance. ### 3. Best standalone container for Microservices **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Piyush L. | Data Engineer 2, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 28, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Run anywhere concept is very good. Which is good to run Microservices, big data code deployment **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Assembling many thing as it is not tightly coupled. This is useful in Microservices based app **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** Highly recommended for startups **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Code deployment where app is divided in Microservices and each run independent ### 4. Apache Kafka the best data stream platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Huy V. | DevOps Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 17, 2022 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Keep do not lost the message package during steaming **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Need more infra resources to implement cluster architechture **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** The best streaming data, helpful to make data etl system, do not lost the message package during steaming ### 5. Best bootstrapping provider **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ankit K. | System QA Sr Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Beet server to connect with different java technology suchnas jsp,servlet. Quick setup. Can explore complex setup while using **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Nothing to dislike but gui for inspection would have added more advantage. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Synchronisation between legecy system & new code. Exporting data from legecy to new system is easy.. with master slave architecture the application can run upto 10 servers. ### 6. A must have tool for runtime programs...! **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** It's a fantastic open-source tool that can manage many cluster instances, artifact repositories, Monitoring, alerting, and BAM. You can do everything in a single bundle. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Karaf runs on JVM, which may not run smoothly if you miss out or mess up the versions while installing and upgrading; you will have to take care to version a lot. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps manage clusters and artifact repositories. We have been using this for monitoring, alerting, and business activity monitoring since it's is open source, so that we could save some bucks as well. ### 7. Apache Karaf Review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** KrishnaPrasad J. | Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 29, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Easy for software development. Less code does much work **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** It was somehow confusing while starting the learning. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are creating the routes. i.e., the transformation of data. Creating and consuming the API etc.. ### 8. Best Open Source ETL tool of the year **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pramod S. | Project Manager Scrum Master, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Open Source, low latency platform and its capability to manage load in a unique way **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Not that great for analytics platform though it has capability to send data to other platforms **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Integration of microservices ### 9. Good runtime **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 28, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Ease of deployment and environment setup and the centralized logging system of Apache Karaf is a pretty neat feature to log information. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Some time it is complicated to find the right way to resolve the dependencies. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** Overall it is a reasonable runtime. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am experimenting with runtime for a future project which requires and stable and manageable runtime to run java applications. ### 10. Server **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohd S. | Survey Programmer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** This is the best server to connect with JSP, servlet, and other java technologies. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Nothing to dislike, but all the time need to compile if changes have been made. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** We can test in real-time applications that need to go live. We can test before going live. ### 11. First impressions **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcel S. | Senior Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Quick setup and running - in a SpringBoot application just add annotation @KafkaListener to your Consumer and you are good to go. Also you can explore more complex setups while using a running application. Also horizontal scalability is a big like. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** I wished that a graphical explorer interface would be provided for inspecting topics **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** Solid performance, robust implementation. It is very easy to start and build as you go. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Synchronization between legacy code and new developed application. Just used single point of change in old application to be able to export data that can be consumed by multiple new apps, in different ways. Also persistence of messages removed a concern about disaster recovery or simple crashes of kafka consumers. ### 12. Best Match Fault Tolerant Server for Batch Application **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arpit S. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Deployment process of a batch applications was very simple in Apache Karaf even in the Clustered Environment. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Sometimes the deployment of image on the servers were not reflected properly on all the servers so we need to re-deploy the application on all the servers again. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** Best server for batch applications **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Business requirement was to generate a transaction report in .csv format for all the Credit Card transactions. There was a huge amount of Data to pick and files that were generated after our successful run were in GBs. We need to run our Apache Batch application in a Clustered Way in and the process needs to be quick and fault tolerant. With the Master/Slave Architecture the application was running on 10 servers in Apache Karaf in a clustered way. ### 13. Used Apache Karaf , while using jboss fuse for supporting requests from multiple platforms **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** pranjali s. | Assistant Consultant (C3), Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 20, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** It works as a standalone container. Supported multiple platform **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** It felt quite complicated . The solutioning had quite long process of sending a request from database to the outbound application **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** Recommended **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had a b2b outbound solution , wherein we were getting requests from multiple platforms . Karaf was quite helpful ### 14. Apache karaf application server Benefits **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 06, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** It’s very easy deploy either directly or using devops . Also have command based to Manages environments. Good handles on server load in distributing system and great on process management and memory management **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Need to improve the cloud api call in order to update configuration and properties **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** I will always recommend as to do your deployment application on Apache karaf **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have applications with heavy load on memory and cache occupancy so we chose karaf as our application server on a distribution slides so we can share the application load by share thread pool ### 15. Modularization approach **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ahsan K. | Development Team Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Making logical independent modules, Wrapping normal jar, predefined dependencies as a features, anatomy of each bundle, powerfull shell command and bundle life cycle. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Sometimes resolving dependencies takes so much time. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1 Wrapping normal jar helps to embedded as a bundle. 2 Installing lucene dependencies as a feathers part, I was able to work on search on my application freely. ### 16. Karaf Container is a modern and polymorphic container. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Sporting Goods | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Folder based hot deployment, Centralized Logging System,It has it's own way of provisioning bundles and start levels. (org.apache.karaf.features) and Karaf has it's own maven plugins as well. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** 1) Class-loading is the most obvious challenge when using OSGi. 2) some open source libraries may be not fully compatible with OSGi infrastructure and it may be hard to use them out of the box as it is in standard Java applications. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** OSGI bundles can be installed, started, stopped, updated, and uninstalled without bringing down the whole system ### 17. Developed nano service using Jboss Fuse and Apache Camel for banking application **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kaleeswaran K. | Technical Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 11, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Compatibility Set , OSGI bundle, Service, private and public API and modularity **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Required expert to develop app using Fuse **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Versioning with compatibility set, Service discovery using Service, Easy scale and deploy ### 18. Surely will recommend **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Manivannan B. | Associate Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Loose coupling of modules. And services. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Some in-depth concepts like logging in karat is difficult to understand **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** Easy and efficient to use **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** My application is very big and modules are tightly coupled. Karaf solves this problem ### 19. Good implementation of poor standard **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 05, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Nice implementation, in boundaries of OSGI achieves quite good results. It is the result of human design, it would be better if it is the result of more natural human action. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** OSGI standard is artificial and too complicated. There are probably better solutions. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Modularity, plug and play, scaling, maintainability ### 20. Karaf as a container for OSGI project **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aisuluu K. | Software Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 31, 2019 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** management of bundles (can easily install new bundle, start, stop) - very useful when running OSGI modules and you want to temporarily stop/add some modules; lightweight independent bundles - no cascade fails **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** takes very long to update (difficult to test, have to maven install and restart the whole thing) logs sometimes are not useful (very often it occurs that some module is failing and you cant understand why until you find out that some requirement is missing, but logs not saying anything about it) updating module that contains hibernate entities requires to restart whole Karaf (otherwise hibernate connection is not recreated) no self load balancing no metrics given outside **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** use latest version of karaf check compatibility of OSGI dependencies! do not place hibernate entities in modules that are going to be updated frequently (use separate submodule) if using maven karaf distribution should be the last module in the list! **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have one big project written in Java that utilizes OSGI pattern. There are more than 70 microservices each containing its own submodules for api, impl, jobs, etc. Karaf is integrated nicely with apache Camel, and that's the library we use mostly. We have 7-8 machines running different groupings of microservices (one - for USSD systems, another - for Target Marketing campaings, etc) - Karaf helps us to manage them efficiently. Containers are lightweight, do not require much memory and are totally independent of each other. ### 21. Karaf is awesome! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 10, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Hot pluggablity of changes on the web server. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Nothing specific until now. It may be a challenge in the pure CNA **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** Use it if it fits the use case **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mediation server with hot adapter updates ### 22. Karaf is a great modular runtime **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kevin S. | Principal, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 21, 2019 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** Karaf is a great runtime for our Java application. It allows the creation of loosely coupled services and provides the necessary infrastructure for our applications. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** The tutorials/examples could be a bit better as there are several options on how to do some things or as the OSGi spec has changed or new versions of Karaf have come out, there are new/better ways but you sometimes find the old way when searching. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Small modular runtime for our applications that can be customized/configured for our needs. ### 23. Good at keeping track of versioning, difficult to configure for application **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2018 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** It is very good at making sure the software built is from a known version of every component that is part of it. This is because version parameters are set up for each component in the application, that control the min and max version of that particular component. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** Initially it is very hard to set up the feature file for the application - which lists all the components and their dependencies. Often would get wiring errors, and the error messages are not very helpful in explaining them. It is a lot of trial and error, and very time consuming. Once set up it works great, until you have to introduce a new component into the mix and then sometimes the fun begins all over again! **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** It does what it claims to do but is hard to get your application set up to work with it. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** Controlling versioning of components/libraries that make up a software application. It does make sure that you know EXACTLY what is in each component built with it. ### 24. Best container with hot deployment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Smitha B. | Graduate Student, Computer Science, Higher Education, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2018 **What do you like best about Apache Karaf?** The hot deploy feature allows you to simply drop a KAR package, and the deployment is complete. **What do you dislike about Apache Karaf?** You need to restart it often; in case of an upgraded package, it doesn't sync. Restart the container. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Karaf:** Go Ahead, it's a good container. **What problems is Apache Karaf solving and how is that benefiting you?** portable application. ## Apache Karaf Discussions - [What is Karaf Java?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-karaf-java) - [Is Karaf a Microservice?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-karaf-a-microservice) - [What is Karaf feature?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-karaf-feature) - [What is the use of Apache Karaf?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-use-of-apache-karaf) - [how to check origin of hanging inflight exchanges in some routes?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-to-check-origin-of-hanging-inflight-exchanges-in-some-routes) - 1 upvote - [View Apache Karaf pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-karaf/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-23+23%3A00%3A56+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=f4992beb-1c13-463c-8143-83694b0a7f71&secure%5Btoken%5D=5529edea64baada2a860de068f16020d5564c74729486d8e1d8438035d8d28c0&format=llm_user) ## Top Apache Karaf Alternatives - [GlusterFS](https://www.g2.com/products/glusterfs/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (27 reviews) - [IBM Storage Ceph](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-storage-ceph/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (21 reviews) - [Red Hat Runtimes](https://www.g2.com/products/red-hat-runtimes/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (60 reviews)