Software Alternatives & Reviews

Ably VS Apache Kafka

Compare Ably VS Apache Kafka and see what are their differences

Ably logo Ably

Serious realtime infrastructure

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.
  • Ably Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-23

Ably is an enterprise-ready pub/sub messaging platform. We make it easy to efficiently design, quickly ship, and seamlessly scale critical realtime functionality delivered directly to end-users. Everyday we deliver billions of realtime messages to millions of users for thousands of companies.

We power the apps people, organizations, and enterprises depend on everyday like Lightspeed System’s realtime device management platform for over seven million school-owned devices, Vitac’s live captioning for 100s of millions of multilingual viewers for events like the Olympic Games, and Split’s realtime feature flagging for one trillion feature flags per month.

We’re the only pub/sub platform with a suite of integrated services to build complete realtime functionality like showing a driver’s live GPS location on a home-delivery app, instantly loading the most recent score when opening a sports app, while automatically handling reconnection when swapping networks. We guarantee low latency delivery of all messages to subscribers over a secure, reliable, and highly available global edge network.

Developers from startups to industrial giants choose to build on Ably to simplify engineering, minimize DevOps overhead, and increase development velocity.

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

Ably videos

How to build a collaborative environment around your product

More videos:

  • Demo - How to build an avatar stack with Ably Spaces
  • Demo - Ably 101: Serverless WebSockets at scale

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 Ably and Apache Kafka)
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Data Integration
0 0%
100% 100
Mobile Push Messaging
100 100%
0% 0
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

Ably Reviews

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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 Ably. It has been mentiond 120 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.

Ably mentions (20)

  • Essential guide to WebSocket authentication
    Of course, if this all sounds like a headache, you might consider Ably. Apart from solving the authentication problem, Ably provides additional features you’d need to implement on top of WebSockets like Presence and message queues, and provides production guarantees that will be time-consuming or costly to achieve on your own like 99.999% uptime guarantee, exactly-once delivery, and guaranteed message ordering. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • The top real-time notification services for building in-app notifications
    Ably is a robust real-time data delivery platform based on WebSockets with features like message ordering, presence, and connection recovery. Customers include Toyota, HubSpot, and Verizon. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Serverless WebSockets with Ably
    I reached for Ably because they had a booth at the 2022 Jamstack Conf, and probably gave me a sticker or something. (You hear that? Sponsor your local tech conference!) They have a generous free tier, which is an absolute requirement for this space, where devs like me usually want to try a product on something that doesn't make us any money, and then that translates (ideally) into recommending it in our... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Cursor Everywhere: An experiment on shared cursors for every website
    A realtime protocol like WebSockets seemed like a logical way to share real-time updates of cursor positions. Working at Ably, it was a no-brainer to use it as my WebSocket-based pub/sub broker. A pub/sub broker simplifies many aspects of projects like this, often coming with built-in features that speed up development. For instance, I wanted each browser's cursor position to be continually available to other... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Laravel Realtime with Ably & Laravel Livewire
    So let's get started. Firs thing to do is to create an account in Ably, so head there and create your account. Then, you have to create an application, give it a name, and we are good to go. The next thing to do, is to grab the API key. From the Ably dashboard, head to API Keys, you will find 2 keys, we are interested in the first one. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
View more

Apache Kafka mentions (120)

  • 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 / about 1 month 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 / 3 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 / 3 months ago
  • 🦿🛴Smarcity garbage reporting automation w/ ollama
    *Push data *(original source image, GPS, timestamp) in a common place (Apache Kafka,...). - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • How to Build & Deploy Scalable Microservices with NodeJS, TypeScript and Docker || A Comprehesive Guide
    RabbitMQ comes with administrative tools to manage user permissions and broker security and is perfect for low latency message delivery and complex routing. In comparison, Apache Kafka architecture provides secure event streams with Transport Layer Security(TLS) and is best suited for big data use cases requiring the best throughput. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

PubNub - PubNub is a real-time messaging system for web and mobile apps that can handle API for all platforms and push messages to any device anywhere in the world in a fraction of a second without having to worry about proxies, firewalls or mobile drop-offs.

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

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

Amazon SQS - Amazon Simple Queue Service is a fully managed message queuing service.