Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Event Broker comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Apache Kafka and PubSub+ Event Broker based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Message Queue (MQ) Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Apache Kafka vs. PubSub+ Event Broker Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most important feature for me is the guaranteed delivery of messages from producers to consumers.""The valuable features are the group community and support.""The processing power of Apache Kafka is good when you have requirements for high throughput and a large number of consumers.""Kafka is scalable. It can manage a high volume of data from many sources.""A great streaming platform.""The publisher-subscriber pattern and low latency are also essential features that greatly piqued my interest.""I have seen a return on investment with this solution.""We appreciate the ability to persistently and quickly write data, as well as the flexibility to customize it for multiple customers. Additionally, we like the ability to retain data within Apache Kafka and use features, such as time travel to access past customer data. The connection with other systems, such as Apache Kafka and IBM DB2."

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"Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40 plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days.""Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data.""The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live.""When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works.""As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using.""In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator.""The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable. It can be used for any kind of business where you've got multiple users who need information. Any company, such as LinkedIn, with a huge number of subscribers and any business, such as publishing, supermarket, airline, or shipping can use it.""We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."

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Cons
"We cannot apply all of our security requirements because it is hard to upload them.""The solution should be easier to manage. It needs to improve its visualization feature in the next release.""Apache Kafka can improve by making the documentation more user-friendly. It would be beneficial if we could explain to customers in more detail how the solution operates but the documentation get highly technical quickly. For example, if they had a simple page where we can show the customers how it works without the need for the customer to have a computer science background.""Maintaining and configuring Apache Kafka can be challenging, especially when you want to fine-tune its behavior.""The manageability should be improved. There are lots of things we need to manage and it should have a function that enables us to manage them all cohesively.""Kafka does not provide control over the message queue, so we do not know whether we are experiencing lost or duplicate messages.""Observability could be improved.""The support on Apache Kafka could be improved."

More Apache Kafka Cons →

"The section on observability pertains to understanding the functioning of an event crash. Instead of focusing on how the crash occurs, attention is given to the observable aspects, such as a memory pipeline where one person pushes messages and another reads them. However, this pipeline often encounters issues, such as the reader being unavailable, causing the system to become stuck and preventing the messages from moving forward. This can lead to the pipeline being permanently stalled.""It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use.""One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf.""Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement.""I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure.""The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker.""If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it.""A challenge we currently have is Solace's ability to integrate with single sign-on in our Active Directory and other single sign-on tools and platforms that any company would have. It's important for the platforms to work. Typically, they support only LDAP-based connectivity to our SQL Servers."

More PubSub+ Event Broker Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "I would not subscribe to the Confluent platform, but rather stay on the free open source version. The extra cost wasn't justified."
  • "When starting to look at a distributed message system, look for a cloud solution first. It is an easier entry point than an on-premises hardware solution."
  • "It is open source software."
  • "Licensing issues are not applicable. Apache licensing makes it simple with almost zero cost for the software itself."
  • "Apache Kafka is open-source and can be used free of charge."
  • "Kafka is open-source and it is cheaper than any other product."
  • "Kafka is more reasonably priced than IBM MQ."
  • "The solution is open source; it's free to use."
  • More Apache Kafka Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."
  • "We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."
  • "Having a free version is critical for our technology operations use case. This is primarily because our technology operations team is a cost center in our company. They are not profit drivers and having a free version for installation will probably meet our needs. Even for production, it'll support up to a 100,000 messages per second. I don't think in technology operations that we have that many events and alerts from our detection tools. Even if I have 20 or 30 event detection products out there, they're only going to publish the things which are critical or warnings. I don't think we'll ever reach a 100,000 messages per second."
  • "Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."
  • "The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."
  • "We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."
  • "The licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey."
  • "It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
  • More PubSub+ Event Broker Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of users… more »
    Top Answer:Apache Kafka is an open-source solution that can be used for messaging or event processing.
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live.
    Top Answer:The section on observability pertains to understanding the functioning of an event crash. Instead of focusing on how the crash occurs, attention is given to the observable aspects, such as a memory… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    15,886
    Comparisons
    12,223
    Reviews
    34
    Average Words per Review
    530
    Rating
    8.0
    Views
    3,726
    Comparisons
    2,901
    Reviews
    7
    Average Words per Review
    1,620
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Solace Virtual Message Router, Solace Cloud, Solace Message Router Appliance
    Learn More
    Overview

    Apache Kafka is a highly regarded open-source, distributed event streaming platform and Message Queue (MQ) software solution that is valued and trusted worldwide by many of the top fortune 100 companies. It is considered one of the most reliable Message Queue (MQ) software solutions available in the marketplace today.

    Enterprise organizations rely on streaming platforms and MQ software solutions to process the continuous flow of high-performance data pipelines, mission-critical applications, and data integration. Apache Kafka makes it easy to process and distribute messages from one application to another from multiple environments with super-fast speeds and very high reliability.

    Additionally, in place of the usual command line processes regarding administration and management tasks, Apache Kafka supplies five exemplary core APIs for both Scala and Java:

    • Kafka Streams API can be used to facilitate stream processing applications and microservices. Input is seamlessly read from one or more topics and will initiate output to one or more topics, easily converting the input streams to output streams.
    • Kafka Connect API enables users to develop and run reusable data import/export connectors that are able to read and write streams of events from external operating systems and applications, making integration with Apache Kafka simple and streamlined.
    • Consumer API allows users to subscribe and read one or more topics and to process the stream of events produced to them.
    • Admin API gives users the ability to examine and manage brokers, topics, and various other Kafka topics.
    • Producer API using this core element, users are able to write and publish a stream of events to one or more Kafka topics.

    Apache Kafka Benefits

    Apache Kafka has many valuable benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

    • Load Shifting
    • Scalability
    • Decoupling
    • High Throughput
    • High Availability
    • Safe Permanent Storage
    • Excellent Integration Capabilities
    • Large, Reliable, Open-Source Community
    • Mission Critical
    • Wide Array of Available Learning Opportunities

    Not only is Apache Kafka a robust messaging queue it is also a tremendously durable and reliable streaming platform that is fully capable of securely delivering more than one million messages per second, which amounts to trillions of success delivered messages in one day.

    Reviews from Real Users

    “From my experience with Apache Kafka, one of the most notable advantages is its ability to maintain a comprehensive record of historical data that includes every update, alteration, and version of information, unlike a conventional relational database. This feature allows for seamless tracking and analysis of the progression and transformation of the data over time, enabling users to easily review and analyze the history of the information.” Dimitrios Z., Enterprise Architect at Smals vzw

    “We are currently on a legacy version and have found that the latest version of Kafka has solved many of the issues we were facing, such as sequencing, memory management, and more. Additionally, the fact that it is open source is a major benefit.” Pratul S. Software Engineer at a financial services firm

    “The solution has improved our functionality; it's one of the best streaming platforms I've used.” Sreekar N., Co-Founder at Attaika

    Solace PubSub+ Event Broker is a serverless, scalable technology that efficiently streams events throughout all sorts of environments: within the cloud, on-premises, and IoT. The technology is based on the publish/subscribe model of communication. The “+” in the solution’s name alludes to its support of a wide spectrum of message exchange patterns beyond the publish/subscribe model; it supports queueing, streaming, and request/reply. The “+” also alludes to the fact that the solution supports a range of different qualities of service. PubSub+ Event Broker can be managed and monitored with a single administration interface.

    PubSub+ Event Broker uses robust, battle-tested, and reliable event broker technology. It allows users to tie their architectures together to benefit from the best of all technologies, including legacy ESBs/messaging, DB system of record on-prem, cloud-native services, and Kafka clusters as endpoints.

    PubSub+ Event Broker lets you connect event brokers to form an event mesh (an architecture layer) which allows you to route events in a dynamic way between applications, regardless of where those applications are deployed (for example, from public-cloud, private-cloud, or no-cloud).

    PubSub+ Event Broker Benefits

    PubSub+ Event Broker is the only unified event broker technology available as software, hardware, and a managed service. All options offer the same functionality and management experience.

    • Software: Simple to use in clouds, containers and iPaaS/PaaS.
    • Hardware: A turnkey appliance with low TCO that gives you robust performance and capacity.
    • Managed service: Cloud based version is managed by Solace, allowing you to accomplish event broker services in minutes and scale to any level.

    PubSub+ Event Broker Capabilities

    • Orchestrates and connects microservices
    • Pushes events from on-premises systems of record to cloud services
    • Enables digital transformation across LoBs and IoT

    PubSub+ Event Broker Features

    • Federated architecture: Routing across geographically distributed cloud and on-premises environments, self-learning routing, bandwidth-efficient routing over wide area networks.
    • APIs and protocols: Native support for AMQP, Node.js, WebSocket, MQTT, JMS, Paho, Qpid,numerous messaging APIs and free open-source Kafka connectors.
    • Advanced messaging capabilities: Message caching, replay, prioritization, and dead message queues.
    • Management and governance: Centralized administration, automated disaster recovery, authentication, authorization and encryption of information, built-in high availability, and proactive monitoring, including integration with existing monitoring tools.
    • Capacity and performance: High-capacity throughput persistent and non-persistent messaging in fanout scenarios, optimized for low latency, and numerous concurrent IoT connections.

    Reviews from Real Users

    PubSub+ Event Broker stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its ability to communicate with numerous subscribers and its scalability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Jitendra J., a websphere MQ specialist at a maritime company, notes, “The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable. It can be used for any kind of business where you've got multiple users who need information. Any company, such as LinkedIn, with a huge number of subscribers and any business, such as publishing, supermarket, airline, or shipping can use it.”

    The head of enterprise architecture and digital innovation at a tech vendor writes, “This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement.”

    Another PeerSpot user, who is a senior project manager at a financial services firm, describes, "Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40 plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days."

    Sample Customers
    Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
    FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm26%
    Computer Software Company18%
    Retailer16%
    Media Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm29%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Retailer6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm60%
    Pharma/Biotech Company10%
    Maritime Company10%
    Transportation Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm34%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Retailer6%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise74%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise7%
    Large Enterprise71%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise8%
    Large Enterprise74%
    Buyer's Guide
    Apache Kafka vs. PubSub+ Event Broker
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Kafka vs. PubSub+ Event Broker and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Apache Kafka is ranked 1st in Message Queue (MQ) Software with 76 reviews while PubSub+ Event Broker is ranked 6th in Message Queue (MQ) Software with 15 reviews. Apache Kafka is rated 8.0, while PubSub+ Event Broker is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Apache Kafka writes "Real-time processing and reliable for data integrity". On the other hand, the top reviewer of PubSub+ Event Broker writes "Event life cycle management changes the way a designer or architect will design a topic and discover what is available". Apache Kafka is most compared with IBM MQ, Red Hat AMQ, Amazon SQS, Anypoint MQ and VMware RabbitMQ, whereas PubSub+ Event Broker is most compared with IBM MQ, VMware RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Confluent and Amazon EventBridge. See our Apache Kafka vs. PubSub+ Event Broker report.

    See our list of best Message Queue (MQ) Software vendors.

    We monitor all Message Queue (MQ) Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.