Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Kafka VS Prometheus

Compare Kafka VS Prometheus and see what are their differences

Kafka logo Kafka

Apache Kafka is publish-subscribe messaging rethought as a distributed commit log.

Prometheus logo Prometheus

An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.
  • Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-24
  • Prometheus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13

Kafka features and specs

  • High Throughput
    Apache Kafka is capable of handling a large volume of data with very low latency, making it ideal for real-time data processing applications.
  • Scalability
    Kafka can effortlessly scale out by adding more brokers to a cluster, allowing it to handle increased data loads.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Kafka offers built-in replication and fault tolerance, ensuring that data is not lost even if some brokers or nodes fail.
  • Durability
    Messages in Kafka are persistently stored on disk, providing durability and data recovery capabilities in case of failures.
  • Stream Processing
    Kafka, along with Kafka Streams, offers powerful stream processing capabilities, allowing real-time data transformation and processing.
  • Ecosystem
    Kafka has a rich ecosystem that includes Kafka Connect for data integration, Kafka Streams for stream processing, and many other tools that make it easier to work with data.
  • Language Support
    Kafka clients are available in multiple programming languages, providing flexibility in choosing the technology stack for your project.

Possible disadvantages of Kafka

  • Complexity
    Setting up and managing a Kafka cluster can be complex, requiring expertise in distributed systems and careful configuration.
  • Resource Intensive
    Kafka can be resource-intensive, requiring significant memory and CPU resources, especially at scale.
  • Operational Overhead
    Maintaining Kafka clusters involves considerable operational overhead, including monitoring, tuning, and managing brokers and partitions.
  • Data Ordering
    While Kafka guarantees ordering within a partition, maintaining total order across a topic with multiple partitions can be challenging.
  • Latency
    In certain use-cases, such as strict low-latency requirements, Kafka’s design might introduce higher latency as compared to some specialized messaging systems.
  • Learning Curve
    Kafka has a steep learning curve, which might make it harder for new developers to get started quickly.
  • Data Storage
    Despite Kafka’s durability features, large volumes of data storage can become costly and need careful management to avoid sluggish performance.

Prometheus features and specs

  • Powerful Query Language
    Prometheus uses PromQL, a flexible and powerful query language that allows for complex and detailed queries.
  • Dimensional Data Model
    Prometheus employs a multidimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key-value pairs, offering great flexibility in data organization.
  • Auto-Discovery
    It supports service discovery mechanisms to automatically locate and scrape metrics from jobs, simplifying the monitoring process.
  • Alerting
    Prometheus includes built-in alerting capabilities that allow you to trigger alerts based on PromQL queries, which can be integrated with different alert management systems.
  • Scalability
    Its architecture, which uses independent single servers, scales well, allowing you to handle a large number of time series efficiently.
  • Open Source
    Prometheus is open-source and supported by a large community, offering transparency, regular updates, and numerous integrations.
  • Easy Integration
    Thanks to its compatibility with various data exporting standards and a myriad of existing exporters, integrating Prometheus into existing systems is streamlined.

Possible disadvantages of Prometheus

  • Single Points of Failure
    Prometheus instances operate independently, meaning that if a server goes down, the metrics it monitored will be unavailable unless replicated manually.
  • Storage Overhead
    Prometheus can consume significant storage, especially for high-resolution time series data, which might necessitate careful planning and management.
  • Limited Long-Term Storage
    By default, Prometheus is not designed for long-term storage of metrics and may require integration with other systems like Thanos or Cortex for this purpose.
  • Complexity for Beginners
    The sheer number of features and the complexities associated with PromQL can present a steep learning curve for newcomers.
  • Scaling Write Operations
    In high-scale environments, write operations might become a bottleneck due to the single-server nature of the Prometheus architecture.
  • Lack of Native High Availability
    While Prometheus supports running multiple instances, it does not provide built-in high availability features out-of-the-box, necessitating additional configurations.
  • No Built-in Authentication and Authorization
    Prometheus lacks native support for secure authentication and authorization, which means these features must be externally managed.

Kafka videos

Franz Kafka - In The Penal Colony BOOK REVIEW

More videos:

  • Review - LITERATURE: Franz Kafka
  • Review - The Trial (Franz Kafka) – Thug Notes Summary & Analysis

Prometheus videos

How Prometheus Monitoring works | Prometheus Architecture explained

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Kafka and Prometheus)
Log Management
10 10%
90% 90
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Analytics
100 100%
0% 0
Backend Development
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Kafka and Prometheus. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

Kafka Reviews

6 Best Kafka Alternatives: 2022’s Must-know List
In this article, you learned about Kafka, its features, and some top Kafka Alternatives. Even though Kafka is widely used, the technology segment has advanced to the point where other options can overshadow Kafka’s cons. There are various options available for choosing a stream processing solution. Organizations are increasingly embracing event-driven architectures powered...
Source: hevodata.com

Prometheus Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
The 10 Best Prometheus Alternatives 2024 Prometheus is one of the most well-known open-source monitoring tools out there. But is it right for you? Check out these Prometheus alternatives to find out.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Under the hood, Grafana is powered by multiple tools like Loki, Tempo, Mimir & Prometheus. SigNoz is built as a single tool to serve logs, metrics, and traces in a single pane of glass. SigNoz uses a single datastore - ClickHouse to power its observability stack. This makes SigNoz much better in correlating signals and driving better insights.
Source: signoz.io
GCP Managed Service For Prometheus vs. Levitate | Last9
Levitate is up to 30X cost-efficient compared with Google Managed Prometheus. This is possible because of warehousing capabilities such as data tiering, streaming aggregations, and cardinality controls, making it a much superior choice to Google Managed Prometheus.
Source: last9.io
The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: Prometheus is an open source monitoring solution focused on data collection and analysis. It allows users to set up network monitoring capabilities using the native toolset. The tool is able to collect information on devices using SNMP pings and examine network bandwidth usage from the device perspective, among other functinos. The PromQL system analyzes data...
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Prometheus and Grafana are used together as an open-source monitoring and alerting solution with support for Linux servers. Prometheus mainly collects the Linux hardware and OS metrics exposed by *nix kernel and then stores as time-series data, using a pull model over HTTP. You can find metrics information in a multi-dimensional data model of the timestamped metrics (i.e.,...
Source: sematext.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Prometheus seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 275 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.

Kafka mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Kafka yet. Tracking of Kafka recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Prometheus mentions (275)

  • Deploying Prometheus on a Raspberry Pi Cluster
    Deploying Prometheus on a Raspberry Pi cluster is a great way to monitor your Raspberry Pis and gather insightful metrics from them. In this guide, we'll walk through the steps to set up Prometheus with one master node (Pi) and three worker nodes (Pis). - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Kubernetes Observability With Kube-State-Metrics
    You must use Prometheus to collect and query Kube-State-Metrics output. The steps to correctly configure Prometheus to scrape Kube-State-Metrics may vary depending on how you installed Prometheus in your cluster. - Source: dev.to / 9 days ago
  • Working with OpenTelemetry Metrics
    In this setup, we are launching the OpenTelemetry Collector with the configuration file otel-collector-config.yaml and exposing its gRPC and HTTP receiver ports on localhost. Also, we are launching Prometheus with the configuration file prometheus.yaml and exposing its UI on localhost. - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • 10 Best Cloud Monitoring Tools for 2025
    Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution designed for time-series data, commonly used with Grafana for visualization. This combination is popular among organizations seeking customizable and scalable monitoring solutions, especially in Kubernetes environments. - Source: dev.to / 21 days ago
  • Monitoring API Requests and Responses for System Health
    Prometheus + Grafana: Open-source tools that offer maximum flexibility without ongoing licensing costs—ideal for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure and configuration. - Source: dev.to / 23 days ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

Sentry.io - From error tracking to performance monitoring, developers can see what actually matters, solve quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the frontend to the backend.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Raygun - Raygun gives developers meaningful insights into problems affecting their applications. Discover issues - Understand the problem - Fix things faster.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Snare - Snare is well known historically as a leader in the event log space.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources