Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Event Broker comparison

Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform, with the following capabilities:

• It lets you publish and subscribe to streams of records. In this respect it is similar to a message queue or enterprise messaging system.
• It lets you store streams of records in a fault-tolerant way.
• It lets you process streams of records as they occur.

Apache Kafka gets used for two broad classes of application:

• Building real-time streaming data pipelines that reliably get data between systems or applications.
• Building real-time streaming applications that transform or react to the streams of data.

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."