Event streaming · Apache Software Foundation

Apache Kafka

Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput publish-subscribe messaging and durable event logs.

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Apache Kafka is the de facto standard for distributed event streaming: producers publish records to append-only, partitioned, replicated topic logs, and consumers read them independently at their own pace, which decouples systems and allows both real-time stream processing and durable event storage/replay. It scales horizontally across a cluster (now typically run without ZooKeeper using the built-in KRaft consensus protocol) and has a large ecosystem including Kafka Connect for source/sink integrations and Kafka Streams for stream processing. As a foundation project it has no vendor, license fee or managed offering of its own; teams either self-host and operate a cluster themselves or use a managed distribution such as Confluent Cloud, Amazon MSK or Redpanda. It underlies CDC tools like Debezium and countless real-time data architectures.

At a glance

Vendor Apache Software Foundation
Pricing model Open source + paid options
Free tier Yes
Deployment Self-hosted
Open source Yes (Apache-2.0)
Best for Engineering teams building event-driven architectures who want full control over a self-managed streaming backbone.

Pricing

Free and open source with no vendor pricing; operating costs depend entirely on self-hosted infrastructure or a chosen managed distribution.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Features

  • Partitioned, replicated, append-only topic logs
  • Horizontal scalability across brokers
  • KRaft consensus (ZooKeeper-free clusters)
  • Kafka Connect for source/sink integration
  • Kafka Streams for stream processing
  • Exactly-once delivery semantics
  • Long-term event retention and replay

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Head to head

Alternatives

Confluent Fully managed Kafka service from Kafka's original creators, adding schema registry, connectors and stream processing on top. Redpanda Kafka-API-compatible streaming platform built in C++ without ZooKeeper or the JVM, available self-managed or as managed cloud. Apache Pulsar Open-source, cloud-native distributed messaging and streaming platform with built-in multi-tenancy and geo-replication.

Apache Kafka in the index now

Terms to know

Event tracking Capturing specific user actions, such as clicks or purchases, as discrete, named pieces of data. Data pipeline The automated sequence of steps that moves data from source systems to a destination, transforming it along the way. Apache Kafka An open-source distributed event streaming platform that stores records in ordered, durable, replayable logs called topics. Event streaming Continuously publishing and consuming records of things that happened, in order, through a durable, replayable log. Stream processing Processing data continuously as individual events arrive, rather than waiting to accumulate a batch.

Related guides

How to choose an event streaming platform Kafka's protocol won the ecosystem; the real decision is who operates the cluster and whether you need Kafka compatibility at all.