Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Apigee VS Apache Kafka

Compare Apigee VS Apache Kafka and see what are their differences

Apigee logo Apigee

Intelligent and complete API platform

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.
  • Apigee Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-08
  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01

Apigee features and specs

  • Robust API Management
    Apigee offers comprehensive API management capabilities, including API design, development, security, analytics, and lifecycle management. This makes it a powerful platform for managing complex API ecosystems.
  • Security Features
    Apigee includes a variety of robust security features such as OAuth, JWT validation, and threat protection, ensuring that APIs are secure from potential threats and unauthorized access.
  • Scalability
    As part of Google Cloud, Apigee is built to scale easily. It can handle large volumes of API requests effortlessly, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Analytics and Monitoring
    Apigee provides detailed analytics and monitoring tools that give insight into API usage, performance, and error rates. These insights help in optimizing and troubleshooting APIs systematically.
  • Developer Portal
    Apigee includes a customizable developer portal where developers can register, discover, and test APIs, enhancing the developer experience and fostering community engagement.
  • Seamless Integration
    Apigee integrates well with other Google Cloud services as well as third-party applications, providing a unified environment for various cloud services.
  • Policy-Driven Approach
    Apigee’s policy-driven approach allows users to implement complex logic and transformations on APIs through configuration rather than code, streamlining the development process.

Possible disadvantages of Apigee

  • Cost
    Apigee can be expensive, especially for startups and small businesses. The pricing model is generally suited for larger enterprises with significant API traffic.
  • Complex Setup
    Setting up Apigee can be complex and may require a steep learning curve for those new to API management platforms. This can result in longer onboarding times and higher initial setup costs.
  • Performance Overhead
    The extensive features and policies offered by Apigee can introduce performance overhead that might affect API response times, especially if not configured correctly.
  • Limited Customization of Analytics
    While Apigee provides comprehensive analytics out-of-the-box, the customization options for these analytics are somewhat limited compared to more flexible, dedicated analytics platforms.
  • Dependency on Google Cloud
    While integration with Google Cloud services is a pro, it also means that Apigee is more beneficial within the Google ecosystem, potentially limiting its attractiveness for businesses using other cloud platforms.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Using Apigee could lead to a level of vendor lock-in, making it complex and potentially cost-prohibitive to switch to another API management solution once fully integrated.
  • Overhead for Simple Use-Cases
    For simpler API management needs, Apigee might be overkill, introducing unnecessary complexity and cost, when a lighter, more straightforward solution might suffice.

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.

Apigee videos

Apigee Edge: Analytics Demo

More videos:

  • Review - Using Apigee Edge to create and publish APIs that developers love (Google Cloud Next '17)
  • Review - Manage the full API lifecycle with Apigee Edge API platform (Google Cloud Next '17)

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 Apigee and Apache Kafka)
API Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100
APIs
100 100%
0% 0
Data Integration
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 Apigee and Apache Kafka

Apigee Reviews

Top 9 MuleSoft Alternatives & Competitors in 2024
Apigee, one of the prominent MuleSoft alternatives, stands out as a powerhouse for your team looking for unparalleled integration and automation capabilities. Designed with simplicity and efficiency, Apigee empowers you to streamline processes, enhance connectivity, and propel digital transformation forward.
Source: www.zluri.com
Top 10 Best API Management Tools with Feature Comparison
With Apigee API management solutions, the developers can build and deliver the applications.
15 Best Postman Alternatives for Automated API Testing [2022 Updated]
Apigee is an excellent alternative to Postman if you want to try an API tool. This platform helps develop and manage APIs by later fronting services with a proxy. Apigee has two significant components called services and runtime, where services enable API proxies’ creation, management, and deployment. Meanwhile, Apigee runtime is a collection of runtime services. It allows...
Source: testsigma.com
15 BEST SoapUI Alternatives (2022 Update)
Apigee is a cross-cloud API testing tool. It allows the user to measure and test API performance, supports and build API using other editors like Swagger. It offers security and governance policies across all APIs.
Source: www.guru99.com
API Testing with Postman and Postman Alternatives
Apigee is a cross-cloud API testing tool that allows users to measure and test API performance, supports, and builds API using other editors like Swagger. Apigee is one of the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2019 for Full Lifecycle API Management for the fourth consecutive time.

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 Apigee. It has been mentiond 142 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.

Apigee mentions (21)

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Apache Kafka mentions (142)

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What are some alternatives?

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

Postman - The Collaboration Platform for API Development

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform - Anypoint Platform is a unified, highly productive, hybrid integration platform that creates an application network of apps, data and devices with API-led connectivity.

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

RapidAPI for Mac - Paw is a REST client for Mac.

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.