# Apache Kafka Reviews 2026. Verified Reviews, Pros & Cons | Capterra > Is Apache Kafka the right iPaaS solution for you? Explore 18 verified user reviews from people in industries like yours to make a confident choice. Source: https://www.capterra.com/p/228468/Apache-Kafka/reviews --- Apache Kafka 4.5 (18) [View alternatives](https://www.capterra.com/p/228468/Apache-Kafka/alternatives/) Provider data verified by our Software Research team, and reviews moderated by our Reviews Verification team. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/our-story/) * * * Last updated March 13th, 2026 # Reviews of Apache Kafka Ease of use 3.5 Customer Service 3.8 ## Showing most helpful reviews Showing 1-18 of 18 Reviews Sort by: Most Helpful Rating Company Size Reviewer's Role Length of Use Frequency of Use Ava H. Senior Staff Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Reliable Data Streaming" September 24, 2024 5.0 Pros It is excellent for handling large-scale real-time data streams. It’s highly reliable and perfect for managing event-driven architectures. Cons The setup and configuration can be quite complex, especially for beginners, and requires a solid understanding of distributed systems. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Data Analytics Manager Logistics and Supply Chain Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Good stream processing platform" April 5, 2022 4.0 We used Apache Kafka to move our data integration pipelines from batch to streaming. This has given us a more efficient and cost-effective solution to keep our data warehouse up-to-date in near real-time. Pros Apache Kafka's stream processing capabilities allowed us to move from batch jobs to streaming data pipelines which greatly improved the freshness of our data warehouse. Cons It's very challenging to set up, manage, and monitor if you're not using a managed SaaS solution. Alternatives considered [Amazon Kinesis](https://www.capterra.com/p/234124/Amazon-Kinesis/) Reason for choosing Apache Kafka With the open-source Apache Kafka, we're able to self-host it in our existing servers at no additional upfront cost. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Programmer Security and Investigations Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Kafka, my best not queue system" January 31, 2022 4.0 Pros The functionality of kafka is just so good, everything works fine and nothing breaks any time. also the distribution is really good Cons Really hard to deploy it, and maintain it. depends on a lot of things like zoopkeeper. Review Source Riya J. Software Engineer Computer & Network Security Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Best for the Stream line Data Processing " March 27, 2023 5.0 It is designed to handle large volume of data with no data loss where real time data processing is allowed.It has high support and community available on the Internet. Pros It is an open source which can handle real time data, Due to its scalability and fault tolerance it is the best choice for the large amount of real time data processing. No message will be lost even in the case of software or hardware failure Cons It is a complex to setup for those who are new for the distributed network. It is dependent on the zoo keeper which is a single point failure. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Software developer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Kafka is great if it fits your use case" May 3, 2022 4.0 Pros I have usually worked in teams where kafka was already set up and managed by a dedicated team. It has been pretty easy to integrate new services into the existing topics and start consuming messages, there was no friction to populate the data needed in those new services. Another aspect I liked about kafka is that integrating RBAC access to the topics was not hard at all. Cons The hardest part of using kafka, for me has been the operational overhead it produces, it is really time consuming and expensive to set up a cluster and start working with it, this makes me usually not choose it as a first option when starting a project because of these reasons and use instead something more lightweight like SNS/SQS or rabbit. Using a managed solution like confluent or kinesis has greatly mitigated this issue although still this requires a monthly cost investment before your workload starts generating revenue. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer BigData Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "A good messaging queue system for stream processing real-time data" February 20, 2023 4.0 It has helped us so much in implementing our solution and making it possible to proceed further, to the next steps. Pros Good with partitioning and replication of data to avoid fault tolerance and avoiding data loss when Kafka goes down. It has very low latency which is important and found it to be scalable, adding in more consumers to read the data when the data published is huge to balance out avoiding Backpressure. Cons Whenever we publish data from producers to Kafka, it is stored in a buffer and then it is published to Kafka, so we need to always flush the buffer to keep it empty. When the destination server side cannot accept the requests then we need to manually push the message requests from source again multiple times, which could be automated. Review Source Ahmed A. Associate Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "You should definitely consider it for your Event Sourcing project! " July 29, 2021 5.0 Pros The feature set is just amazing, it enables you to build resilient and fault tolerant applications with ease Cons It's not very easy to install on locally hosted cloud orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes and OpenShift, even though installation on Docker is as simple as running one command with a simple docker-compose file Review Source SR Sakshi R. Infrastructure Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Apache Kafka Honest Review " October 9, 2022 5.0 Apache Kafka increases the real time productivity of my team, I can store the data and then process it just because of Apache Kafka, earlier it was difficult for me handle such large amount of data simultaneously.it is scalable and it allows many aaplications to share information flawlessly.kafka makes our work easy and reliable. Pros Apache Kafka handles large amount of data at a time, speed at which it sends large number of messages is Seamlessly.it's easy to learn and apply Kafka,it allows producer-consumer message flows.The best thing is architecture which I like the most and it is easy to understand/learn how exactly Kafka works. Cons Apache Kafka is not that cheap. I recommend Apache Kafka only if you are handling large amount of data.one more thing which is don't like much is Kafka's dependency on zookeeper for setting up the cluster and maintenance if it can be removed then it would help. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Senior software Engineer Banking Used the software for: 2+ years ### "The most important component of an event driven architecture " April 28, 2022 5.0 We use it to relay events from upstream systems and consume them in our streaming pipeline. It is very important in our event driven architecture Pros Easy to use, fast, reliable and has an easy to use API. Cons It’s a bit hard to maintain when you have a large kafka cluster with a lot of topics. Review Source Paweł W. Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Kafka for scalable data processing" September 8, 2022 5.0 Pros I really enjoyed to work with Kafka throughout the years on different projects. It has an extensive API and solid documentation in various programming languages. Some of the concepts are really advanced. Kafka helped us to create data processing pipelines and it was quite easy to maintain them. Cons Kafka includes some really advanced concepts, so for production uses it required highly experienced Software Engineers. Review Source IM Ian M. Programador Philanthropy Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "La cucaracha del software moderno" July 27, 2025 1.0 Horrible. Difícil de depurar. Cambiaron la definición de mensajes y hubo que esperar casi un mes a que todo volviese a funcionar. No resuelve ningún problema serio. Puede que en LinkedIn o sistemas similares sea la panacea. Es la segunda vez que se usa en la misma empresa con los mismos desastrosos resultados, Pros Nada. Lo impusieron en un entorno de microservicios que, de entrada, no tendrían que haberse utilizado por las características del proyecto. Cons Sobrevalorado. Te lo endiñan como la solución a todos tus problemas. Complicado depurar tu código. En mi proyecto, la infraestructura retrasó seis meses el desarrollo. Switched from [Lightspeed Restaurant](https://www.capterra.com/p/211849/Lightspeed-Resturant/) Me obligaron. Empezaron con los mensajes de fin de servicio, y finalmente todo lo querían con Kafka. Review Source AM Anusha M. Software engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "App-App communication made easy" March 2, 2023 5.0 Been using Kafka to create topics for to and fro event triggered communications. Have achieved best results with respect to point to point communication. Very happy with the functionality and performance Pros It speed with which data is processes is very high. It can even adjust to any machine or connection failure. Needs very less hardware and it's capacity can be increased at any time without affecting existing performance Cons Bigger message data is being compressed when processing which affects the performance. Monitoring the queues and topic function is difficult. When multiple queues are being run at the same time the performance is reduced Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Consultant Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Buzzing Streaming Platform" February 3, 2022 5.0 We did setup the product on on-premise mode. And intended purpose of replacing TIBCO EMS& JMS messaging layer with Kafka is done without much struggle. Considering a open source software, give a try with POC and implement in production systems. You will never regret. Pros Apache Kafka is open-sourced event streaming platform. We use this technology as an alternative for TIBCO EMS(Which comes with TIBCO BusniessWorks) to cut licensing price when we migrate from TICBO to Mulesoft. It fits well as a messaging layer to communicated to other mule applications. Cons Looks like a vintage product but really not. True champ. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Senior Consultant Insurance Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Very good messaging product (Kafka): User experience " February 11, 2022 5.0 1.It's a great product which is preferred over most other messaging systems such as JMS, TIBCO EMS, ActiveMQ, Rabbit MQ etc. because of it's high scalability, throughput and availability. 2.In our use case, we configured apache kafka in our application to process thousands of messages daily instead of conventional TIBCO EMS messaging system. There was a huge difference in performance and it greatly served our purpose. Pros 1.Highly scalable messaging software which can process trillions of messages with almost no latency. 2. Can easily be integrated with multiple products such as integration tools, can be used in modern day programming languages and support in multiple frameworks with community help and large number of library support. 3. Cloud compatible which offers huge amount of storage across multiple regions with high availability. It has very rich user community which comes to rescue if we are stuck anywhere in it's usage and implementation. 4. Helps build fault tolerant applications easily and almost never lets break anything in message processing. Cons 1\. It's bit difficult to set it up locally and management of the cluster becomes a little tough when there are huge number of queues are to configured. 2. It matches only exact topic name and does not support wildcard topic selection. 3. Due to compression of the messages when the size increase, it affects the overall performance and the throughput. 4. Lack of messaging paradigms like point-to- point queues, request/reply operations as compared to other systems such as EMS. Review Source SM Srikar M. Software engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Best Point to point api communication tool" February 25, 2023 5.0 Have been using to integrate multiple api's and communicate seamlessly. Very satisfied with the solution the app provides Pros It has very good durability and it can send in many messages from api to api within milli seconds of time. Doesn't need heavy system setup. User friendly. Messages sent to and fro could be retails for defined period of time if needed. Cons Though it has various messaging capabilities, kafka has poor debugging and logging tools to monitor an app communication topic which is risky. Sometimes when there are multiple queues its performance is reduced drastically Review Source OD Osman D. Senior Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Kafka\_01" July 26, 2022 5.0 i use it to process many events what sent by iot application i developed. Pros Kafka is the best stream processing application. it is highly event based. it process data highly speed. Cons Apache kafka depends on zookeeper. This makes Apache Kafka management difficult. Review Source MP Marcos P. Machine Learning Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "The reference in data engineering" June 22, 2023 4.0 Pros The ease of processing large batches of data in a short time and the ease of being able to do it in python. The integration with multiple data sources is something to mention. Its really easy to manage all the incoming data. Cons the deployment process is not as simple as I would like. Once you know the process it's easy, but as a novice user it can be costly and the errors you get are not intuitive for troubleshooting deployment. Review Source EH Erich H. Desenvolvedor Information Technology and Services Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Avaliação " July 12, 2023 5.0 Pros Capacidade de autogerenciamento e alta disponibilidade Cons Implementação é muito complexa especialmente para configuração de múltiplas réplicas Review Source Similar Products Featured