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Meltano VS Apache Kafka

Compare Meltano VS Apache Kafka and see what are their differences

Meltano logo Meltano

Open source data dashboarding

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.
  • Meltano Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04
  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01

Meltano features and specs

  • Open Source
    Meltano is open-source, which means that it is free to use and can be customized according to specific business needs. The open-source nature fosters a community-driven approach to improvements and updates.
  • Modular Architecture
    Meltano offers a modular architecture that allows users to mix and match different components like extractors, loaders, and transformers, providing flexibility and adaptability.
  • Integration with Singer Taps
    It is compatible with Singer Taps and Targets, enabling Meltano to connect with a wide variety of data sources and destinations, making data integration seamless.
  • Command Line Interface (CLI)
    Meltano provides a robust CLI that simplifies managing and orchestrating ETL workflows, which can be advantageous for developers who prefer working with command-line tools.
  • Community and Support
    There is a vibrant community and an active support system, which can be helpful for troubleshooting and getting advice on best practices regarding Meltano usage.

Possible disadvantages of Meltano

  • Steep Learning Curve
    For users who are not familiar with command line tools or open-source data integration platforms, Meltano can have a steep learning curve, requiring time and effort to master.
  • Limited Built-in Features
    While being modular offers flexibility, Meltano has fewer built-in features compared to some commercial ETL tools, which might require users to build custom solutions.
  • Variable Support for Sources/Destinations
    The quality and reliability of connectors can vary since Meltano relies on community-contributed Singer Taps, which may not be as stable or well-documented as proprietary alternatives.
  • Complex Configuration
    Initial setup and configuration can be complex, especially when connecting to multiple data sources or when customization is necessary, which may require significant technical expertise.
  • Resource Dependency
    As an evolving open-source project, Meltano may require more resources in terms of time and effort to stay updated with the latest features and community contributions.

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.

Meltano videos

Meltano tutorial

More videos:

  • Demo - Meltano Sprint Review & Demo Day 2019-11-08
  • Review - Meltano Weekly Sprint Review 2019-11-01

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 Meltano and Apache Kafka)
Business Intelligence
100 100%
0% 0
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Data Integration
9 9%
91% 91

User comments

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Reviews

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

Meltano Reviews

Top 11 Fivetran Alternatives for 2024
Meltano was established in 2018 as an open-source project within GitLab to assist their data and analytics team. It’s a Python framework based on the Singer protocol. Originally developed by the founders of Stitch, the Singer framework saw reduced contributions after Stitch was acquired by Talend, which was later acquired by Qlik. Despite these changes, Meltano has continued...
Source: estuary.dev
Top 10 Fivetran Alternatives - Listing the best ETL tools
The platform provides users with a wide range of integration options, including connectors for databases, APIs, and application logs. Additionally, Meltano provides extensive support for data transformation and orchestration and integrates well with several cloud-based data warehouses.
Source: weld.app

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 Meltano. 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.

Meltano mentions (26)

  • AI product development is being held back by data engineering
    Hey HN, Arch CEO here! Our team has been working at the intersection of data engineering and software engineering for a few years now with Meltano (https://meltano.com), and this year, the rise in Generative AI has made it clear that the bottleneck in unlocking the potential value of data has shifted from data integration on data teams to data engineering on software teams, so we’ve decided to do something about... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • How useful is Airbytes in production pipelines?
    We use Meltano for (EL) and Prefect for scheduling. Is not click-ops, but works very well for us! Behind the scenes Meltano wraps up Singer spec similarly like Airbyte does with its connectors. Before that we tried Airbyte (~5 months ago?) and it was so bad.. We could not choose the columns to replicate and the connectors were unstable i.e. Skipping data, all sort of odd errors and so on.. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2023)
    Meltano's all-remote team and community of thousands are on a mission to enable everyone to realize the full potential of their data. To this end, we are bringing software engineering best practices to data teams in the form of an open-source DataOps platform that we envision becoming the foundation of every team's ideal data stack. Our public company handbook (https://handbook.meltano.com/) has all the details on... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2023)
    Meltano | Full-Time | Remote | https://meltano.com Meltano's all-remote team and community of thousands are on a mission to enable everyone to realize the full potential of their data. To this end, we are bringing software engineering best practices to data teams in the form of an open-source DataOps platform that we envision becoming the foundation of every team's ideal data stack. Our public company handbook... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • If dbt is the "T" part of an "ELT", what do you use for "EL"?
    We switched from AWS Glue to Meltano for the EL part of ELT and it's been a joy to use. We're moving so much faster now. Source: over 2 years ago
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Apache Kafka mentions (144)

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What are some alternatives?

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

Airbyte - Replicate data in minutes with prebuilt & custom connectors

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

Apache Superset - modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence web application

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

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

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