Install
Tools
Event streaming
7 tools compared: how each is priced, where it runs, and what to consider instead.
| Tool | Pricing model | Free tier | Open source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Kinesis AWS's managed service for real-time data streaming, ingesting and processing continuous data at scale without managing servers. | Usage-based | No | No |
| Apache Kafka Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput publish-subscribe messaging and durable event logs. | Open source + paid | Yes | Yes |
| Apache Pulsar Open-source, cloud-native distributed messaging and streaming platform with built-in multi-tenancy and geo-replication. | Open source + paid | Yes | Yes |
| Azure Event Hubs Microsoft's managed big-data streaming service, exposing a Kafka-compatible endpoint for event ingestion on Azure. | Usage-based | No | No |
| Confluent Fully managed Kafka service from Kafka's original creators, adding schema registry, connectors and stream processing on top. | Usage-based | Yes | No |
| Google Cloud Pub/Sub Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless messaging service for asynchronous event ingestion between applications and analytics pipelines. | Usage-based | Yes | No |
| Redpanda Kafka-API-compatible streaming platform built in C++ without ZooKeeper or the JVM, available self-managed or as managed cloud. | Usage-based | Yes | No |