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Apache Kafka vs Redis comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Apache Kafka boosts efficiency and insights with customizable, cost-effective data processing, enhancing analytics and decision-making in many applications.
Sentiment score
7.2
Redis enhances ROI by improving performance, reducing costs, increasing productivity, and ensuring reliable, scalable, and efficient service.
I can say we have noticed a strong return on investment largely due to improved scalability and reduced operational friction in asynchronous workflows.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
It improved API latency from two seconds to 450 milliseconds for P99.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
We reduced the database read load by around 30 to 40 percent and improved API response time by 20 to 30 percent, specifically for frequently accessed endpoints.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.9
Apache Kafka support relies on community help; paid options like Confluent offer better but occasionally slow assistance.
Sentiment score
5.8
Redis is stable and reliable, with helpful support, strong documentation, and often minimal need for direct assistance.
Practically, the biggest support channels are its community ecosystem, documentation, GitHub discussions, and engineering forums.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
The Apache community provides support for the open-source version.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
There is plenty of community support available online.
The documentation and community support for Redis are very strong, making troubleshooting quicker.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Since Redis is quite stable and well-documented, we have not needed much support, but when required, the response has been helpful.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Apache Kafka excels in scalable data handling, efficiently managing growth despite occasional challenges in adjustments and resource management.
Sentiment score
7.8
Redis excels in horizontal and vertical scaling, offering clustering, sharding, and compatibility with Azure and AWS for enterprise adaptability.
Customers have not faced issues with user growth or data streaming needs.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
For traffic spikes, Apache Kafka naturally helps by buffering events, allowing consumers to catch up instead of immediately overwhelming downstream services.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
I need to enable my solution with high availability and scalability.
Data Architect at Ascendion
Data migration and changes to application-side configurations are challenging due to the lack of automatic migration tools in a non-clustered legacy system.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I scale Redis horizontally using clustering and sharding, where data is distributed across multiple nodes to handle higher traffic and larger data sets.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
With features such as clustering and replication, it can handle high traffic and a large database very effectively.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Apache Kafka is stable and reliable, though configuration complexities and evolving APIs may pose occasional challenges.
Sentiment score
7.8
Redis is stable, handles heavy loads, offers high availability, and uses persistence mechanisms, making it a trusted choice.
Testing changes in lower environments before production rollout and verifying replication health and cluster stability is essential.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Apache Kafka is stable.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
This feature of Apache Kafka has helped enhance our system stability when handling high volume data.
DevOps Engineer
Redis is fairly stable.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek easier setup, improved UI, better documentation, monitoring, and memory management for Apache Kafka, addressing complexity and scalability.
Redis users face challenges with scalability, GUI, documentation, security, and seek enhancements in monitoring, analytics, and multi-tenancy features.
The performance angle is critical, and while it works in milliseconds, the goal is to move towards microseconds.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
We are always trying to find the best configs, which is a challenge.
Team Lead, Data Engineering at Nesine.com
Data persistence and recovery face issues with compatibility across major versions, making upgrades possible but downgrades not active.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Redis itself does not enforce consistency with the primary database, so developers need to carefully design cache invalidation strategies.
Software Engineer at ValueMomentum
One issue is cache invalidation. Keeping cache data consistent with the source of truth can be tricky, especially in distributed systems.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users weigh open-source Apache Kafka's low cost against expensive cloud solutions like Confluent, requiring careful cost analysis.
Redis pricing depends on memory, cluster size, and infrastructure, with higher costs than SQL due to RAM usage.
The open-source version of Apache Kafka results in minimal costs, mainly linked to accessing documentation and limited support.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Its pricing is reasonable.
For new teams, the cost and resources required at a very large scale for maintaining a high throughput cluster with replication and retention can be resource-intensive.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Since we use an open-source version of Redis, we do not experience any setup costs or licensing expenses.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The costs are primarily driven by memory consumption and cluster size, since Redis operates in-memory.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
The pricing is reasonable for the performance provided.
SDE 2 at Virtusa
 

Valuable Features

Apache Kafka offers scalable, reliable real-time streaming, integration with Spark, robust architecture, and strong community support for customization.
Redis offers low latency, high throughput, and scalability with rich data structures, ideal for real-time applications and caching.
Apache Kafka is effective when dealing with large volumes of data flowing at high speeds, requiring real-time processing.
Apache Kafka is particularly valuable for managing high levels of transactions.
Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA
Regarding durability and reliability, messages are persisted, so temporary consumer failures do not automatically lead to data loss, which is valuable in financial workflows where losing events is unacceptable.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
It functions similarly to a foundational building block in a larger system, enabling native integration and high functionality in core data processes.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
First is its in-memory preference, as Redis is extremely fast, making it ideal for caching and session management where low latency is critical.
Software Engineer at ValueMomentum
Real API latency improved from around two seconds to approximately 450 milliseconds for P99.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
 

Categories and Ranking

Apache Kafka
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (5th)
Redis
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (4th), Managed NoSQL Databases (6th), In-Memory Data Store Services (1st), Vector Databases (4th), AI Software Development (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Apache Kafka and Redis aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Apache Kafka is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 4.0%, up 2.8% compared to last year.
Redis, on the other hand, focuses on In-Memory Data Store Services, holds 22.0% mindshare, up 16.9% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Kafka4.0%
Apache Flink8.9%
Databricks8.1%
Other79.0%
Streaming Analytics
In-Memory Data Store Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Redis22.0%
Amazon ElastiCache17.4%
Google Cloud Memorystore13.5%
Other47.1%
In-Memory Data Store Services
 

Featured Reviews

Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Event-driven workflows have improved payment processing and reduced latency across services
One area for improvement in Apache Kafka is operational complexity. Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise. Debugging and observability can be complex in large systems, as troubleshooting issues such as consumer lag, offset management problems, or uneven partition distribution can become challenging. The learning curve is relatively steep, requiring a good understanding of concepts such as partition, consumer group, offset commit, and delivery guarantees to avoid subtle production issues. One area where Apache Kafka could improve is the developer experience around debugging and tracing events end to end. In distributed systems, when an event passes through multiple topics and consumer services, troubleshooting can become time-consuming. Better built-in observability for tracing event flows across services would be very useful.
Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Caching has accelerated complex workflows and delivers low latency for high-traffic microservices
A few features of Redis that I use on a day-to-day basis and feel are among the best are extremely low latency and high throughput. Since Redis is in-memory, it makes it ideal for cases such as caching and rate limiting where response time is critical. TTL expiry support is very useful in Redis as it allows me to automatically evict stale data without manual cleanup, which is something I use heavily in my caching strategy. Another point I can mention is that the rich data structures such as strings, hashes, and even sorted sets are very powerful. I have used strings for caching responses and counters, whereas I have used hashes for storing structured objects. One more feature I can tell you about is atomic operations. Redis guarantees atomicity for operations such as incrementing a counter, which is very useful for rate limiting and avoiding race conditions in distributed systems. Finally, I want to emphasize that Redis is easy to scale and integrate, whether through clustering or using a distributed cache across microservices. Redis has impacted my organization positively by providing default support that is very useful. For metrics, in one of my core systems, introducing Redis as a distributed cache helped me achieve around an 80% cache hit rate, which reduced repeated downstream services. Real API latency also improved from around two seconds to approximately 450 milliseconds for P99. It also helped reduce the load on dependent services and databases, which improved overall system reliability.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise51
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?
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 user...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?
Its pricing is reasonable. It's not always about cost, but about meeting specific needs.
What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?
The long-term data storage feature in Apache Kafka depends on the setting, but I believe the maximum duration is seven days.
What do you like most about Redis?
Redis is better tested and is used by large companies. I haven't found a direct alternative to what Redis offers. Plus, there are a lot of support and learning resources available, which help you u...
What needs improvement with Redis?
Overall, Redis is a powerful and reliable tool, but there are a few areas for improvement. One limitation is that Redis is memory-based, so scaling can become expensive compared to disk-based syste...
What is your primary use case for Redis?
My main use case for Redis is caching frequently accessed data to improve performance and reduce database load. For example, I cache API responses and user-related data so that repeated requests ca...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Redis Enterprise
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
1. Twitter 2. GitHub 3. StackOverflow 4. Pinterest 5. Snapchat 6. Craigslist 7. Digg 8. Weibo 9. Airbnb 10. Uber 11. Slack 12. Trello 13. Shopify 14. Coursera 15. Medium 16. Twitch 17. Foursquare 18. Meetup 19. Kickstarter 20. Docker 21. Heroku 22. Bitbucket 23. Groupon 24. Flipboard 25. SoundCloud 26. BuzzFeed 27. Disqus 28. The New York Times 29. Walmart 30. Nike 31. Sony 32. Philips
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Kafka vs. Redis and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
895,151 professionals have used our research since 2012.