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A Complete Comparison of Apache Kafka vs Confluent

Used by over 70% of the Fortune 500, Apache Kafka has become the foundational platform for streaming data, but self-supporting the open source project puts you in the business of managing low-level data infrastructure. With Kafka at its core, Confluent offers complete, fully managed, cloud-native data streaming that's available everywhere your data and applications reside.

Here are the major differences between Confluent and Kafka, as well as a complete stackup of features - from connectors, security, and monitoring, to governance.

Unleash a cloud-native experience with a complete feature-set only available with Confluent

Confluent provides a truly cloud-native experience, completing Kafka with a holistic set of enterprise-grade features to unleash developer productivity, operate efficiently at scale, and meet all of your architectural requirements before moving to production. Underpinning the platform is our 99.99% uptime SLA and committer-driven expertise, providing support and services from the team with over one million hours of technical experience with Kafka.

Truly Cloud-native Design

 Apache KafkaConfluent

Serverless

Automated, fully managed Kafka clusters with zero ops

Automated, fully managed Kafka clusters with zero ops

Elastic Scaling

Scale up and down from 0 to GBps without over-provisioning infra

Scale up and down from 0 to GBps without over-provisioning infra

Infinite Storage / Tiered Storage

Cost-effectively retain data at any scale without growing compute

Cost-effectively retain data at any scale without growing compute

High Availability

Guaranteed 99.99% uptime SLA with built-in failover and multi-AZ replication

Guaranteed 99.99% uptime SLA with built-in failover and multi-AZ replication

No ZooKeeper management

Metadata management completely abstracted away

Metadata management completely abstracted away

No-touch patching and upgrades

Fully optimized infra with zero-downtime patching and upgrades

Fully optimized infra with zero-downtime patching and upgrades

Unrestricted Developer Productivity

 Apache KafkaConfluent

Apache Kafka

Distributed event streaming platform that's become de facto industry standard

Distributed event streaming platform that's become de facto industry standard

Kafka Connect

Pluggable, declarative data integration framework

Pluggable, declarative data integration framework

Kafka Streams

Client library for stream processing

Client library for stream processing

Multi-language Development

  

Java Clients

Write producer / consumer apps with Java

Write producer / consumer apps with Java

Non-Java Clients

C/C++, Python, Go, .NET

C/C++, Python, Go, .NET

REST Proxy

Access Kafka from any network connected application

Access Kafka from any network connected application

MQTT Proxy

Access Kafka from MQTT devices & gateways

Access Kafka from MQTT devices & gateways

Stream Processing & Integration

  

Connectors

120+ expert-built and tested connectors

120+ expert-built and tested connectors

ksqlDB

SQL-based stream processing for on-prem and hybrid workloads

SQL-based stream processing for on-prem and hybrid workloads

Stream Designer

Visual canvas for rapidly building streaming data pipelines extensible with SQL

Visual canvas for rapidly building streaming data pipelines extensible with SQL

Efficient Operations at Scale

 Apache KafkaConfluent

GUI-driven Management

  

Cloud UI / Control Center

GUI to manage & monitor clusters at any scale

GUI to manage & monitor clusters at any scale

Intelligent Monitoring & Observability

  

Metrics API

Discover topic & cluster-level metrics, request metrics values, or post queries

Discover topic & cluster-level metrics, request metrics values, or post queries

Datadog / Prometheus Integration

Monitor data streams directly alongside the rest of your technology stack

Monitor data streams directly alongside the rest of your technology stack

Health+

Intelligent alerting & cloud-based monitoring to ensure cluster health

Intelligent alerting & cloud-based monitoring to ensure cluster health

Flexible DevOps Automation

  

Admin REST APIs

Simplify management via RESTful interface for performing admin ops

Simplify management via RESTful interface for performing admin ops

Confluent for Kubernetes

Complete, declarative API to deploy on Kubernetes

Complete, declarative API to deploy on Kubernetes

Ansible Playbooks

Automate deployment on non-containerized environments

Automate deployment on non-containerized environments

Self-Balancing Clusters

Automated partition rebalancing to optimize performance

Automated partition rebalancing to optimize performance

Production-stage Prerequisites

 Apache KafkaConfluent

Enterprise-grade Security

  

Access Control Lists

Authorization controls for cluster data

Authorization controls for cluster data

Role-Based Access Control

Granular resource-level authorization of access across user groups

Granular resource-level authorization of access across user groups

Audit Logs

Structured user action logs to detect security threats & anomalies

Structured user action logs to detect security threats & anomalies

Secret Protection / Encryption

Encrypt all data-at-rest and network traffic to clients with TLS 1.2

Encrypt all data-at-rest and network traffic to clients with TLS 1.2

Bring Your Own Key

Encrypt data-at-rest with your own custom key(s)

Encrypt data-at-rest with your own custom key(s)

Private Networking

VPC/VNet peering, AWS Transit Gateway, AWS/Azure Private Link, GCP Private Service Connect

VPC/VNet peering, AWS Transit Gateway, AWS/Azure Private Link, GCP Private Service Connect

HIPAA/GDPR/CCPA readiness

Built-in compliance including SOC 1/2/3 & ISO 27001, GDPR/CCPA readiness, and more

Built-in compliance including SOC 1/2/3 & ISO 27001, GDPR/CCPA readiness, and more

Data Governance

  

Schema Registry

Central registry to ensure data compatibility

Central registry to ensure data compatibility

Schema Validation

Broker-side schema validation & enforcement with topic-level granularity

Broker-side schema validation & enforcement with topic-level granularity

Stream Catalog

Self-service data discovery to search, classify, & organize your data streams

Self-service data discovery to search, classify, & organize your data streams

Stream Lineage

Understand data lineage with interactive, end-to-end mapping of your data streams

Understand data lineage with interactive, end-to-end mapping of your data streams

Stream Sharing

Simple and safe way to share streaming data across organizations

Simple and safe way to share streaming data across organizations

Global Resilience

  

99.99% Uptime SLA

Safely run mission critical workloads with SLA covering both software & infrastructure

Safely run mission critical workloads with SLA covering both software & infrastructure

Cluster Linking

Seamlessly link clusters across any environment to build hybrid & multicloud architectures

Seamlessly link clusters across any environment to build hybrid & multicloud architectures

Multi-AZ / Multi-Region Clusters

Minimize downtime by running across multiple availability zones or regions

Minimize downtime by running across multiple availability zones or regions

MirrorMaker 2

Asynchronous replication based on Kafka Connect

Asynchronous replication based on Kafka Connect

Replicator

Expert-built, supported, & battle-tested replication across clusters based on Kafka Connect

Expert-built, supported, & battle-tested replication across clusters based on Kafka Connect

Committer-driven Expertise

 Apache KafkaConfluent

24x7x365 Expert Support

Access to world's foremost Kafka experts with over 1 million hours of experience

Access to world's foremost Kafka experts with over 1 million hours of experience

Professional Services

Customized hands-on engagements to achieve your business outcomes in timely manner

Customized hands-on engagements to achieve your business outcomes in timely manner

Education

Variety of training offerings to build streaming expertise across your organization

Variety of training offerings to build streaming expertise across your organization

To truly tap into Kafka, you need Confluent

Cloud-native

Eliminate your ops burden with a truly cloud-native Kafka solution

While Kafka is a powerful distributed system, modern enterprises do not want to be in the business of supporting the open source distribution in-house. ZooKeeper needs to be managed, partitions rebalanced, failover and scaling processes designed — the list goes on. Confluent completely re-architected Kafka from the ground up to provide teams with a truly cloud-native experience that delivers an elastically scalable and globally available service ready to deploy, operate, and scale in a matter of minutes.

Complete

Accelerate time-to-value and reduce TCO with a complete data streaming platform

Kafka is a powerful platform, but it doesn’t offer everything you need out-of-the-box. With open source Kafka alone, you’re on the hook to build and maintain foundational tooling and infrastructure, such as connectors, data governance and security, disaster recovery capabilities, and more. And when ready to deploy, the platform creates a significant ongoing operational burden — one that only grows over time. Your business has better things to do. Confluent provides a holistic set of enterprise-grade capabilities designed to eliminate the need to spend costly dev cycles building and maintaining tools, helping customers save up to 60% in TCO and quickly realize value from their real-time use cases.

Everywhere

Seamlessly connect your data and applications everywhere they reside across hybrid and multicloud architectures

Kafka helps to streamline digital architectures in real time, avoid complex point-to-point integrations, and break data silos. To truly meet that goal though, you need a solution that spans all of your environments, both on-premises and across cloud providers. Confluent exists everywhere your applications and data reside, providing you the freedom to leverage a fully managed service on all leading public clouds and self-managed software you can deploy for on-premises workloads, whether on bare metal, VMs, or Kubernetes. Best of all, you can seamlessly connect it all together in real time with Cluster Linking to create a consistent data layer across your entire business.

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"For me to go hire a bunch of engineers to babysit Kafka, I don’t have the ability to go do that. And being able to offload those concerns is just such a relief for us and lets us focus on delivering value to the organization and not worrying about ops and other overhead... Just things like spinning up Kafka clusters and getting prototypes up and running very quickly, Confluent has been really helpful there. Those sort of exercises might take a long time for my team to do if we were doing this on vanilla open source Kafka. With Confluent, we can turn that around very quickly."

Natt Kupp

Director of Engineering, Data

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Confluent Cloud

A fully managed, cloud-native service for Apache Kafka, available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

Confluent Platform

A complete, enterprise-grade distribution of Apache Kafka for workloads in your on-prem and private cloud environments

Learn more about Confluent and Kafka

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