Pulsar Advantages Over Kafka

Javier Ramos
ITNEXT
Published in
10 min readNov 10, 2020

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Introduction

Recently, I’ve been looking at Pulsar and how it compares to Kafka. A quick search will show you that there is a current “war” between the two most famous open source messaging systems.

As a Kafka user, I do struggle with some of the issues with Kafka and I’m very exited about Pulsar. So finally, I managed to have some time to play around with it and I did quite a lot of research. In this article, I will focus on the Pulsar advantages and give you some reasons why you should consider it over Kafka. But let’s be clear, in terms of production usage, support, community, documentation, etc; Kafka clearly surpasses Pulsar, and I would only consider Pulsar if most of the advantages discussed in this article hold true to your use case. Let’s begin!

Kafka in a Nutshell

Kafka is the king of messaging systems. Created by LinkedIn in 2011, it has spread widely thanks to the support of Confluent who has released to the open source community many new features and add-ons such as Schema Registry for schema evolution, Kafka Connect for easy streaming from other data sources such as databases to Kafka, Kafka Streams for distributed stream processing, and most recently KSQL for performing SQL-like querying over Kafka topics and much more. It has also many connectors to many system, check Confluent

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Certified Java Architect/AWS/GCP/Azure/K8s: Microservices/Docker/Kubernetes, AWS/Serverless/BigData, Kafka/Akka/Spark/AI, JS/React/Angular/PWA @JavierRamosRod