Message Streaming

Redpanda11.9k★

If you need a message streaming platform — real-time data pipelines, event-driven architectures, log aggregation — and you've looked at Apache Kafka but the operational complexity scares you, Redpanda is the answer. Kafka-compatible API, 10x faster, and no Java Virtual Machine or ZooKeeper to manage. Written in C++ with a thread-per-core architecture. Single binary deployment. Your existing Kafka clients, connectors, and tooling work unchanged — just point them at Redpanda instead. 12k stars, growing at 39/week. Backed by a well-funded company ($100M+ raised). This is production-grade infrastructure, not a side project. Self-hosted Community edition is free. It's genuinely usable — no artificial limits on throughput or partitions. Enterprise adds features like continuous data balancing, tiered storage to S3, Kerberos auth, and audit logging. The catch: the license (BSL-1.1) means you can't offer Redpanda as a competing managed streaming service. For internal use, no problem. Enterprise pricing isn't published but expect it to be significant — this is infrastructure software for companies with real streaming needs. Also, while Kafka compatibility is excellent, some niche Kafka Streams features and Connect plugins may need testing.