Event streaming · Microsoft

Azure Event Hubs

Microsoft's managed big-data streaming service, exposing a Kafka-compatible endpoint for event ingestion on Azure.

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Azure Event Hubs is a managed event streaming service designed for high-throughput ingestion of telemetry, logs and application events, with a native protocol as well as an Apache Kafka-compatible endpoint that lets existing Kafka producers and consumers connect with only a configuration change. It offers four tiers that trade off cost and isolation: Basic and Standard are billed by throughput unit with shared multi-tenant infrastructure, Premium adds dedicated Processing Units with more retention and included Capture/Kafka support, and Dedicated provides single-tenant Capacity Units for the largest, most predictable workloads. Event Hubs Capture can automatically archive streamed data to Azure Blob Storage or Data Lake without additional code, and it integrates natively with Azure Stream Analytics and Data Factory for downstream processing.

At a glance

Vendor Microsoft
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier No
Deployment Cloud
Open source No
Best for Azure-native teams needing managed, Kafka-compatible event ingestion at enterprise scale.

Pricing

Billed per throughput unit/hour (Basic, Standard) or per Processing/Capacity Unit-hour (Premium, Dedicated), plus per-million-event ingress charges; exact regional rates are not published as flat figures on the pricing page.

Plan Price Notes
Basic Billed per throughput unit-hour plus per-million ingress events 1-day max retention, 84 GB storage; no Capture, Kafka or Schema Registry
Standard Billed per throughput unit-hour plus per-million ingress events 7-day max retention; includes Kafka protocol support and Schema Registry
Premium Billed per Processing Unit-hour 90-day retention, 1 TB storage per PU, ingress and Capture included
Dedicated Billed per Capacity Unit-hour, 4-hour minimum Single-tenant, 10 TB storage per CU, full feature set with geo-replication

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • Kafka-compatible endpoint
  • Four tiers from shared to single-tenant capacity
  • Event Hubs Capture to Blob Storage/Data Lake
  • Schema Registry (Standard tier and above)
  • Geo-replication (Premium/Dedicated)
  • Native Azure Stream Analytics and Data Factory integration

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Alternatives

Amazon Kinesis AWS's managed service for real-time data streaming, ingesting and processing continuous data at scale without managing servers. Google Cloud Pub/Sub Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless messaging service for asynchronous event ingestion between applications and analytics pipelines. Confluent Fully managed Kafka service from Kafka's original creators, adding schema registry, connectors and stream processing on top.

Azure Event Hubs 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. Data lake A storage repository that holds raw data of any format cheaply, with structure applied only when the data is read. Event streaming Continuously publishing and consuming records of things that happened, in order, through a durable, replayable log.

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.