Solace PubSub+ vs Apache Kafka

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	Kafka	Solace
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

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

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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
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.

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	Kafka	Solace
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

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How Solace Compares to Apache Kafka

Different Use Cases Require Different Solutions

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

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

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

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

Feature Comparison Summary

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