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Apache Kafka vs EMQX 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Apache Kafka
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (5th)
EMQX
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (9th), IoT Connectivity (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Apache Kafka and EMQX 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.
EMQX, on the other hand, focuses on Message Queue (MQ) Software, holds 2.8% mindshare, up 1.4% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Kafka4.0%
Apache Flink8.9%
Databricks8.1%
Other79.0%
Streaming Analytics
Message Queue (MQ) Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
EMQX2.8%
IBM MQ21.0%
ActiveMQ19.8%
Other56.4%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Bruno da Silva - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA
Have worked closely with the team to deploy streaming and transaction pipelines in a flexible cloud environment
The interface of Apache Kafka could be significantly better. I started working with Apache Kafka from its early days, and I have seen many improvements. The back office functionality could be enhanced. Scaling up continues to be a challenge, though it is much easier now than it was in the beginning.
AP
Senior Software Engineer
Connected millions of iot devices and manage real time pub sub control and flexible access rules
When going with the open-source EMQX version, there are limitations provided. For example, the webhooks use case cannot be scaled to as large a scale compared to the enterprise edition of EMQX. The open-source version helps a great deal with work in the company. The way this resource helps nurture the IoT device paradigm is greatly helpful for developers working newly on this system because the onboarding part of EMQX is very easy and developer-friendly. Someone who wants to dive into it can easily implement and make the system robust based on the technologies it provides. EMQX provides API connections for applications. HTTP calls can be made to EMQX to get updates from the client. Those connections should be made asynchronously. The webhook part handles this well, but when it comes to the API part, when the load and payload of the MQTT topics and messages are very heavy, sometimes unknown errors occur, and logs and errors must be found. When a specific log session is created for that client, the readability of those logs is not good. The platform itself does not need improvement, but when it comes to developer-friendly implementations of EMQX, there are some pain points that need attention. The visibility of logs, error logs, and information logs inside the built-in monitoring needs work because developers, when they implement code or any kind of specific tools, need proper control over the system. Without that control, there is no point in implementing anything at all. The monitoring part needs work. When it comes to the flow chart of how different clients are connected with different devices, there is a feature inside EMQX called Flow. When that Flow is in place, clients (devices) should be controllable from that Flow itself. These are the most important improvements that need to be addressed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"valuable features relate to microservices architecture and working on KStream and KSQL DB as a microservices event bus."
"It is a stable solution...A lot of my experience indicates that Apache Kafka is scalable."
"Apache Kafka offers unique data streaming."
"We get amazing throughput. We don't get any delay."
"Excellent speeds for publishing messages faster."
"In our current position, we use it to move a lot of data and I think it's definitely working well."
"We are growing and currently, we manage 1M events per second in Kafka."
"The most valuable feature is the messaging function and reliability."
"The outcomes from using EMQX are very cost-saving for us because we previously used the MQTT Mosquitto broker, and when I compare Mosquitto with EMQX, EMQX is far better than Mosquitto and other protocols."
"EMQX is a solid open-source project for making IoT devices connect anywhere in the world."
"The best features EMQX offers in my experience are that it can send messages for a large number of customers with a very high message-per-second rate while consuming low resources."
"EMQX will boost your product sampling rate and transmission so that you can achieve a large amount of data without any loss while transmitting through the internet."
 

Cons

"The initial setup and deployment could be less complex."
"Kafka does not provide control over the message queue, so we do not know whether we are experiencing lost or duplicate messages."
"There are some latency problems with Kafka."
"One of the things I am mostly looking for is that once the message is picked up from Kafka, it should not be visible or able to be consumed by other applications, or something along those lines."
"As an open-source project, Kafka is still fairly young and has not yet built out the stability and features that other open-source projects have acquired over the many years."
"Something that could be improved is having an interface to monitor the consuming rate."
"The interface has room for improvement, and there is a steep learning curve for Hadoop integration. It was a struggle learning to send from Hadoop to Kafka. In future releases, I'd like to see improvements in ETL functionality and Hadoop integration."
"I suggest using cloud services because the solution is expensive if you are using it on-premises."
"If you want to improve further, the SSL certificate and TLS certificate have overhead in serverless EMQX."
"EMQX is a good MQTT broker but the historian is simple."
"The visibility of logs, error logs, and information logs inside the built-in monitoring needs work because developers, when they implement code or any kind of specific tools, need proper control over the system."
"To improve EMQX, I think it should reduce costs, save time when sending messages, and improve reliability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate Apache Kafka's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. There are no additional costs apart from the licensing fees for Apache Kafka."
"I was using the product's free version."
"It is open source software."
"This is an open-source solution and is free to use."
"Kafka is more reasonably priced than IBM MQ."
"When starting to look at a distributed message system, look for a cloud solution first. It is an easier entry point than an on-premises hardware solution."
"This is an open-source version."
"Apache Kafka is an open-sourced solution. There are fees if you want the support, and I would recommend it for enterprises. There are annual subscriptions available."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Legal Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise50
No data available
 

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.
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Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
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