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Airbyte VS Apache Kafka

Compare Airbyte VS Apache Kafka and see what are their differences

Airbyte logo Airbyte

Replicate data in minutes with prebuilt & custom connectors

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.
  • Airbyte Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-23
  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01

Airbyte features and specs

  • Open Source
    Airbyte is open-source, which allows users to review the code, contribute to its development, and customize it according to their specific needs without any restrictions.
  • Extensible Connectors
    The platform supports a wide range of connectors and allows users to build their own, making it highly adaptable for various data integration needs.
  • Community Support
    Being open-source, Airbyte benefits from a vibrant community that contributes to its improvement and offers support through forums and other community channels.
  • Custom Scripting
    Users can create custom data transformation scripts using JavaScript and other languages, providing more flexibility in how data is managed and manipulated.
  • Scalability
    Airbyte is designed to handle large volumes of data, making it suitable for enterprises with significant data integration requirements.
  • Affordability
    With its open-source nature, Airbyte can be a more budget-friendly option compared to proprietary data integration tools.

Possible disadvantages of Airbyte

  • Maturity
    As a relatively new platform, Airbyte may still have some kinks to work out and may lack the polish and robustness of more established data integration tools.
  • Learning Curve
    Given its flexibility and features, new users might find it challenging to get started and fully understand the platform without investing time to learn.
  • Dependency on Community
    While the community aspect is beneficial, it also means that the speed at which issues are resolved or new features are added can vary, depending on the contributors.
  • Limited Enterprise Support
    Dedicated enterprise support is more limited compared to commercial solutions, which could be a disadvantage for organizations that require guaranteed service levels.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running Airbyte, especially at scale, can be resource-intensive, requiring sufficient compute resources, which could be a challenge for smaller organizations.

Apache Kafka features and specs

  • High Throughput
    Kafka is capable of handling thousands of messages per second due to its distributed architecture, making it suitable for applications that require high throughput.
  • Scalability
    Kafka can easily scale horizontally by adding more brokers to a cluster, making it highly scalable to serve increased loads.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Kafka has built-in replication, ensuring that data is replicated across multiple brokers, providing fault tolerance and high availability.
  • Durability
    Kafka ensures data durability by writing data to disk, which can be replicated to other nodes, ensuring data is not lost even if a broker fails.
  • Real-time Processing
    Kafka supports real-time data streaming, enabling applications to process and react to data as it arrives.
  • Decoupling of Systems
    Kafka acts as a buffer and decouples the production and consumption of messages, allowing independent scaling and management of producers and consumers.
  • Wide Ecosystem
    The Kafka ecosystem includes various tools and connectors such as Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and KSQL, which enrich the functionality of Kafka.
  • Strong Community Support
    Kafka has strong community support and extensive documentation, making it easier for developers to find help and resources.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Kafka

  • Complex Setup and Management
    Kafka's distributed nature can make initial setup and ongoing management complex, requiring expert knowledge and significant administrative effort.
  • Operational Overhead
    Running Kafka clusters involves additional operational overhead, including hardware provisioning, monitoring, tuning, and scaling.
  • Latency Sensitivity
    Despite its high throughput, Kafka may experience increased latency in certain scenarios, especially when configured for high durability and consistency.
  • Learning Curve
    The concepts and architecture of Kafka can be difficult for new users to grasp, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Hardware Intensive
    Kafka's performance characteristics often require dedicated and powerful hardware, which can be costly to procure and maintain.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing Kafka's dependencies and ensuring compatibility between versions of Kafka, Zookeeper, and other ecosystem tools can be challenging.
  • Limited Support for Small Messages
    Kafka is optimized for large throughput and can be inefficient for applications that require handling a lot of small messages, where overhead can become significant.
  • Operational Complexity for Small Teams
    Smaller teams might find the operational complexity and maintenance burden of Kafka difficult to manage without a dedicated operations or DevOps team.

Airbyte videos

February 2021 - Airbyte Feature Review: Normalization & Nested Tables

More videos:

  • Review - Open Source Airbyte Can Disrupt Fivetran & Stitch Data
  • Review - How Airbyte Raised 26 Million Dollars For Their Data Engineering Start-Up /W The Co-Founders

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 Airbyte and Apache Kafka)
Data Integration
27 27%
73% 73
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Web Service Automation
26 26%
74% 74

User comments

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Reviews

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

Airbyte Reviews

Best ETL Tools: A Curated List
Airbyte, founded in 2020, is an open-source ETL tool that offers cloud and self-hosted data integration options. Originally built on the Singer framework, Airbyte has since evolved to support its own protocol and connectors while maintaining compatibility with Singer taps. As one of the more cost-effective ETL tools, Airbyte is an attractive option for organizations seeking...
Source: estuary.dev
Top 11 Fivetran Alternatives for 2024
60+ managed connectors, 300+ total: Airbyte lists 300+ connectors. But only 50+ of these are connectors actively managed by Airbyte. The rest are open source connectors listed as Marketplace connectors for Airbyte Cloud. So while they have built a sizable list for a newer vendor, you need to evaluate the connectors based on your needs.
Source: estuary.dev
Top 10 Fivetran Alternatives - Listing the best ETL tools
An open-source data integration platform, Airbyte is a popular choice for those building a modern data stack. Airbyte boasts its collection of ELT connectors as well as the ability to build custom ones in the platform, a differentiator from other no-code ELT tools. Because building custom pipelines requires coding knowledge, this special feature will only benefit data...
Source: weld.app
11 Best FREE Open-Source ETL Tools in 2024
Airbyte is one of the Open-Source ETL Tools that was launched in July 2020. It differs from other ETL tools as it provides connectors that are usable out of the box through a UI and API that allows community developers to monitor and maintain the tool.
Source: hevodata.com
Airbyte vs Fivetran vs Estuary
Airbyte also provides a no-code Connector Development Kit which lets users develop custom connectors. This process typically takes two days on most platforms but the kit lets them get started within 30 minutes. Plus, the Airbyte team and community are always available and can help with their maintenance.
Source: estuary.dev

Apache Kafka Reviews

Best ETL Tools: A Curated List
Debezium is an open-source Change Data Capture (CDC) tool that originated from RedHat. It leverages Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect to enable real-time data replication from databases. Debezium was partly inspired by Martin Kleppmann’s "Turning the Database Inside Out" concept, which emphasized the power of the CDC for modern data pipelines.
Source: estuary.dev
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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Kafka should be more popular than Airbyte. It has been mentiond 144 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.

Airbyte mentions (53)

  • 7 Best Change Data Capture (CDC) Tools in 2025
    Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform that supports log-based CDC from databases like Postgres, MySQL, and SQL Server. To assist log-based CDC, Airbyte uses Debezium to capture various operations like INSERT and UPDATE. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Stream Processing Systems in 2025: RisingWave, Flink, Spark Streaming, and What's Ahead
    Whenever we discuss event streaming, Kafka inevitably enters the conversation. As the de facto standard for event streaming, Kafka is widely used as a data pipeline to move data between systems. However, Kafka is not the only tool capable of facilitating data movement. Products like Fivetran, Airbyte, and other SaaS offerings provide user-friendly tools for data ingestion, expanding the options available to... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Can AI finally generate best practice code? I think so.
    Let’s say I’m using Cursor to build a bunch of data apps and using Airbyte as the data movement platform and Streamlit for the frontend. I’m writing in Python and using the Airbyte API libraries. This is my basic ‘tech stack’. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Understanding the MLOps Lifecycle
    Some popular tools for data extraction are Airbyte, Fivetran, Hevo Data, and many more. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Major Technologies Worth Learning in 2025 for Data Professionals
    Open source tools like Apache Superset, Airbyte, and DuckDB are providing cost-effective and customizable solutions for data professionals. Becoming adept at these tools not only reduces dependency on proprietary software but also fosters community engagement. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
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Apache Kafka mentions (144)

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What are some alternatives?

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

Fivetran - Fivetran offers companies a data connector for extracting data from many different cloud and database sources.

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

QuickBI - Export data from over 300 sources to a data warehouse and analyze it with a reporting tool of your choice. Quick and easy setup.

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.

Meltano - Open source data dashboarding

Histats - Start tracking your visitors in 1 minute!