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Apache Kafka

Open-source event stream processing and analytics platform

Last updated: October 2024

Table of Contents

Apache Kafka - 2025 Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

What is Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source software designed to help businesses across transportation, IT, banking, telecom, and several other industries handle event stream processing operations. It enables IT professionals to collect data from various sources such as databases, mobile devices, sensors, and online applications in the form of streams of events.

Employees can securely store event streams for retrieval, manipulation, and processing of data according to business requirements. The application allows administrators to read and write streams of events in multiple programming languages and connect different clusters across various geographic regions. Apache Kafka lets organizations process payments and financial transactions, analyze sensor data from IoT devices, and capture and store customer interactions in a centralized repository. It also helps logistics and automotive businesses to track and monitor vehicles, trucks, fleets, and shipments in real-time.

Apache Kafka supports integration with various third-party relational databases and event sources via APIs. Other features include data import/export, analytics, data storage management, event logs, activity tracking, and more.

Starting from

No pricing info

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Apache Kafka's key features

Most critical features, based on insights from Apache Kafka users:

API

4.3

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Dashboard

3.4

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Pre-built Connectors

3.9

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Cloud Data Integration

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Data Mapping

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Real-Time Notifications

4.1

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All Apache Kafka features

Features rating:

4.5

(17)

Alerts/Notifications

4.0

(1)

Data Extraction

4.0

(1)

Data Import/Export

4.2

(5)

Data Storage Management

4.0

(1)

Real-Time Analytics

4.0

(1)

Real-Time Updates

4.0

(1)

SMS Messaging

4.0

(1)

Data Connectors

4.4

(5)

Activity Tracking

4.3

(6)

Real-Time Data

4.0

(1)

Apache Kafka alternatives

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Value for Money

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Value for Money

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Customer Support

4.6

Linx

4.4

(27)

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Starting from

599

Per month

Free trial

Free version

Ease of Use

4.2

Features

4.4

Value for Money

4.3

Customer Support

4.4

K3 by BroadPeak

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Free trial

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Ease of Use

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Features

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Value for Money

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Customer Support

5.0

Apache Kafka pricing

Value for money rating:

4.1

Starting from

No pricing info

Pricing details

Subscription

Free trial

Free plan

Pricing range

view pricing plans

Apache Kafka integrations (58)

Integrations rated by users

We looked through 17 user reviews, to identify which products are mentioned as Apache Kafka integrations, and what is the users perception.

Amazon Kinesis

Integration rating: 5.0 (1)

“We use an apache flink job to process events from several kafka topics. These flink jobs are running inside Kinesis data analytics”

Anonymous Reviewer

Senior software Engineer

Amazon S3

Integration rating: 5.0 (1)

“We have integrated the Kafka with the S3 for the event processing before storing the large data in database.”

Riya Jaiswal

Software Engineer

Apache Kafka support options

Typical customers

Freelancers

Small businesses

Mid size businesses

Large enterprises

Platforms supported

Web

Android

iPhone/iPad

Support options

Phone Support

Knowledge Base

FAQs/Forum

Email/Help Desk

Training options

Documentation

Apache Kafka reviews

Overall rating

4.7

Positive reviews

100

Rating breakdown

Value for money
Ease of use
Features
Customer support
Likelihood to recommend8.59/10

Rating distribution

Pros

“The functionality of kafka is just so good, everything works fine and nothing breaks any time. Also the distribution is really good.”

Verified reviewer

Anonymity request

“The best thing is architecture which I like the most and it is easy to understand/learn how exactly Kafka works.”

Sakshi R.

Infrastructure Engineer

“I really enjoyed to work with Kafka throughout the years on different projects. It has an extensive API and solid documentation in various programming languages.”

Paweł W.

Software Engineer

Cons

“Though it has various messaging capabilities, kafka has poor debugging and logging tools to monitor an app communication topic which is risky.”

Srikar M.

Software engineer

“Whenever we publish data from producers to Kafka, it is stored in a buffer and then it is published to Kafka, so we need to always flush the buffer to keep it empty.”

Verified reviewer

Anonymity request

“It’s a bit hard to maintain when you have a large kafka cluster with a lot of topics.”

Verified reviewer

Anonymity request

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