Different Use Cases Require Different Solutions

Solace focuses on enabling real-time connectivity and event-driven data movement across your enterprise. PubSub+ Platform is an event streaming, management, and monitoring platform that will give your organization everything it needs to design, deploy, and manage event-driven systems across cloud, on-premises, and IoT environments.

Apache Kafka, on the other hand, excels at event streaming for storage and log aggregation for analytics.

Here’s our take on how Solace stacks up vs Apache Kafka for various use cases:

Legend:
Great Good Other		KafkaSolace
IoT
  • Not suitable for large scale 
  • Needs to be fronted by other MQTT brokers
  • Great sensor data consumption and command and control
Multi-Cloud
  • Static routing between clouds
  • Poor reliability 
  • Complex remote client setup
  • Great multi-cloud dynamic event routing
  • No remote client setup required
  • Great IaaS services integration
  • Good throughput versus reliable performance
Microservices
  • Limited exchange patterns 
  • Java and other community driven languages
  • Many uses not truly suited for Kafka batching
  • Great breadth of  languages, protocols, message exchange patterns
  • Advanced event mesh
Digital 
Transformation
  • Good CDC tools
  • Less flexible multi-site hybrid cloud solution
  • Great for bimodel development with hybrid cloud
Stream Processing
  • Core product use case
  • Messaging and streaming with good 3rd party stream processor APIs integrated
Low Latency
  • Batch architecture limits performance
  • Great core product use case
Analytics
  • Great core product use case
  • Good for bimodel development with hybrid cloud
Transactional
Workflows
  • No individual message acknowledgement 

  • Individual message ack out of the box (i.e., Need to act upon a ticket purchase)

Legend: Great Good Other

Learn More About How Solace Works with Kafka

3 Reasons PubSub+ is Better Than Kafka: Reliability, Flexibility, Security

  1. Solace PubSub+ is more reliable than Kafka because it has:

    Simpler architecture with fewer components  
    Dynamic routing with intelligent data distribution
    Built-in high availability and disaster recovery

    Learn More

  2. Solace PubSub+ is more flexible than Kafka because it has:

    Smart topic design that enables fine-grained filtering for less bandwidth consumption …no drinking from the firehose!
    Native broker support for standard protocols and open APIs

    Event topics: Kafka vs Solace implementations

  3. Solace PubSub+ is more secure than Kafka because it has:

    A centralized management model that makes it easy to secure across environments
    A comprehensive set of embedded security features that have minimal impact on performance and operational complexity
    A single-entry point to a unified event mesh that applies consistent authentication and authorization policies to all users.

    Learn More

Feature Comparison Summary

KafkaSolace
APIs & Protocols​
  • Non-standard based JAVA API​:
    Others are created independently which leads to inconsistency,​ no backwards compatibility, no support​​
  • APIs for standard protocols: AMQP, JMS, MQTT, REST and WebSocket​
  • Open APIs: Apache Qpid and Eclipse Paho​
Performance
  • Only fast for non-secure communications​
  • High performance messaging for all QoS​
  • Faster than Kafka even with TLS enabled
WAN
  • Complex tiers and components leads to points of failure​ and places where messages can disappear
  • Highly Optimized WAN distribution including intelligent routing and streaming compression​
Security
  • Relies on bridge layer to manage security​
  • Requires manual integration of LDAP/Radius with SASL
  • Easy to integrate with existing authorization systems​ and segregates client authentication and data movement into application domains
Topics
  • Limited scale, exact match subscriptions on flat topics​
  • Lack of fine-grained filtering makes it hard to overlay​ multi-zone hierarchy in hybrid/multi cloud systems
  • Enables sophisticated routing and filtering​​ with support for topic hierarchies, filters and wildcard subscriptions
Messaging Features​
  • Only supports pub/sub messaging
  • Supports all patterns and QoS:​ Pub/sub, request/reply, non-persistent, point-to point queues, replication across sites
Architecture​
  • Independent components for configuration, state coordination and inter-cluster communication​
  • Hard to achieve lossless multi-site disaster recovery
  • Broker holds config data and message state,​eliminating need for other components making it easy to deploy, run and scale

Learn How Solace Compares to Confluent

Related resources

View all Solace PubSub+ vs Apache Kafka Resources

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