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NATS VS Apache Kafka

Compare NATS VS Apache Kafka and see what are their differences

NATS logo NATS

NATS.io is an open source messaging system for cloud native applications, IoT messaging, Edge, and microservices architectures.

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.
  • NATS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-05

NATS.io is a connective technology for distributed systems and is a perfect fit to connect devices, edge, cloud or hybrid deployments. True multi-tenancy makes NATS ideal for SaaS and self-healing and scaling technology allows for topology changes anytime with zero downtime.

  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01

NATS videos

The coolest OSS project you've never heard of: NATS Getting started!

Apache Kafka videos

Apache Kafka Tutorial | What is Apache Kafka? | Kafka Tutorial for Beginners | Edureka

More videos:

  • Review - Apache Kafka - Getting Started - Kafka Multi-node Cluster - Review Properties
  • Review - 4. Apache Kafka Fundamentals | Confluent Fundamentals for Apache Kafka®
  • Review - Apache Kafka in 6 minutes
  • Review - Apache Kafka Explained (Comprehensive Overview)
  • Review - 2. Motivations and Customer Use Cases | Apache Kafka Fundamentals

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to NATS and Apache Kafka)
Developer Tools
60 60%
40% 40
Data Integration
17 17%
83% 83
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100
App Development
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare NATS and Apache Kafka

NATS Reviews

Best message queue for cloud-native apps
NATS is designed to be simple and easy to use, with a small footprint and low latency. It is often used in cloud-native environments to connect different components of a distributed system or to enable communication between microservices. NATS also supports message persistence, security, and clustering, making it a robust messaging system for building scalable and resilient...
Source: docs.vanus.ai
Are Free, Open-Source Message Queues Right For You?
One challenge of NATS is that it does not support reliable message queuing out of the box - messages can be lost if a client disconnects before it receives them. This can be mitigated by using NATS Streaming, a data streaming system powered by NATS, but it adds complexity.
Source: blog.iron.io
NATS vs RabbitMQ vs NSQ vs Kafka | Gcore
NATS is known for its high performance, low latency, and emphasis on simplicity after it was rewritten in Go. Its rewrite in Go makes NATS an ideal choice for demanding and real-time applications and has increased its throughput compared to its original Ruby implementation.
Source: gcore.com

Apache Kafka Reviews

Best message queue for cloud-native apps
If you take the time to sort out the history of message queues, you will find a very interesting phenomenon. Most of the currently popular message queues were born around 2010. For example, Apache Kafka was born at LinkedIn in 2010, Derek Collison developed Nats in 2010, and Apache Pulsar was born at Yahoo in 2012. What is the reason for this?
Source: docs.vanus.ai
Are Free, Open-Source Message Queues Right For You?
Apache Kafka is a highly scalable and robust messaging queue system designed by LinkedIn and donated to the Apache Software Foundation. It's ideal for real-time data streaming and processing, providing high throughput for publishing and subscribing to records or messages. Kafka is typically used in scenarios that require real-time analytics and monitoring, IoT applications,...
Source: blog.iron.io
10 Best Open Source ETL Tools for Data Integration
It is difficult to anticipate the exact demand for open-source tools in 2023 because it depends on various factors and emerging trends. However, open-source solutions such as Kubernetes for container orchestration, TensorFlow for machine learning, Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming, and Prometheus for monitoring and observability are expected to grow in prominence in...
Source: testsigma.com
11 Best FREE Open-Source ETL Tools in 2024
Apache Kafka is an Open-Source Data Streaming Tool written in Scala and Java. It publishes and subscribes to a stream of records in a fault-tolerant manner and provides a unified, high-throughput, and low-latency platform to manage data.
Source: hevodata.com
NATS vs RabbitMQ vs NSQ vs Kafka | Gcore
One of the biggest drawbacks of Apache Kafka is the architecture that makes it so efficient. The combination of brokers and ZooKeeper nodes, along with numerous configurable options, can make it difficult and complex for new teams to set up and manage without encountering performance issues or data loss. However, Kafka can work without ZooKeeper after 3.3.1 version using...
Source: gcore.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Kafka should be more popular than NATS. It has been mentiond 121 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

NATS mentions (65)

  • HN-text: an easy-to-use, text-first Hacker News terminal client
    That sounds awesome. I have actually been working on something similar myself. I have been building a distributed NATS[0] cluster to funnel data down from the internet and index it locally. I also have a local Ollama box wired up to try to do some NLP on it. I started with Benthos to pull in, but since the recent license changes[1] I am rethinking that :( If you would like to collaborate feel free to shoot me an... - Source: Hacker News / 5 days ago
  • Hello World, Simple Event Broker
    I've been happy with NATS, https://nats.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 9 days ago
  • Implementing OTel Trace Context Propagation Through Message Brokers with Go
    Several message brokers, such as NATS and database queues, are not supported by OpenTelemetry (OTel) SDKs. This article will guide you on how to use context propagation explicitly with these message queues. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • NATS: First Impressions
    Https://nats.io/ (Tracker removed) > Connective Technology for Adaptive Edge & Distributed Systems > An Introduction to NATS - The first screencast I guess I don't need to know what it is. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Sequential and parallel execution of long-running shell commands
    Pueue dumps the state of the queue to the disk as JSON every time the state changes, so when you have a lot of queued jobs this results in considerable disk io. I actually changed it to compress the state file via zstd which helped quite a bit but then eventually just moved on to running NATS [1] locally. [1] https://nats.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
View more

Apache Kafka mentions (121)

  • Best Practices for Building Microservices with NestJS
    Choose a consistent communication protocol for inter-service communication. Common protocols include HTTP, gRPC, and message brokers like RabbitMQ or Kafka. NestJS supports various communication strategies, allowing you to choose the one that best fits your needs. - Source: dev.to / 1 day ago
  • Empowering Real-Time Data Pipelines: Leveraging Apache Kafka and Rudderstack
    In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, effective data management and analysis are essential for businesses aiming to stay ahead of the curve. Fortunately, modern tools like Apache Kafka and RudderStack have revolutionized the way we handle and derive insights from large datasets. In this blog post, we’ll explore our experience implementing the Kafka Sink Connector to facilitate seamless event data transfer to... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Choosing Between a Streaming Database and a Stream Processing Framework in Python
    Stream-processing platforms such as Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda are specifically engineered to foster event-driven communication in a distributed system and they can be a great choice for developing loosely coupled applications. Stream processing platforms analyze data in motion, offering near-zero latency advantages. For example, consider an alert system for monitoring factory equipment. If a... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • How to Use Reductstore as a Data Sink for Kafka
    Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform capable of handling high throughput of data, while ReductStore is a databases for unstructured data optimized for storing and querying along time. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • 🦿🛴Smarcity garbage reporting automation w/ ollama
    *Push data *(original source image, GPS, timestamp) in a common place (Apache Kafka,...). - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing NATS and Apache Kafka, you can also consider the following products

Socket.io - Realtime application framework (Node.JS server)

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

Firebase - Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications for mobile and web.

Apache ActiveMQ - Apache ActiveMQ is an open source messaging and integration patterns server.

Pusher - Pusher is a hosted API for quickly, easily and securely adding scalable realtime functionality via WebSockets to web and mobile apps.

StatCounter - StatCounter is a simple but powerful real-time web analytics service that helps you track, analyse and understand your visitors so you can make good decisions to become more successful online.