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Apache Kafka vs Redis comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.2
Apache Kafka offers ROI through scalability, cost reduction, time savings, customization, and valuable insights, despite some challenges.
Sentiment score
7.2
Redis enhances ROI by improving performance, reducing costs, increasing productivity, and ensuring reliable, scalable, and efficient service.
I can say we have noticed a strong return on investment largely due to improved scalability and reduced operational friction in asynchronous workflows.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
It improved API latency from two seconds to 450 milliseconds for P99.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
We reduced the database read load by around 30 to 40 percent and improved API response time by 20 to 30 percent, specifically for frequently accessed endpoints.
Sde 2 at Netaji Subhash Engineering College
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.9
Apache Kafka primarily depends on an active open-source community for support, complemented by in-house expertise and optional paid services.
Sentiment score
5.8
Redis is stable and reliable, with helpful support, strong documentation, and often minimal need for direct assistance.
Practically, the biggest support channels are its community ecosystem, documentation, GitHub discussions, and engineering forums.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
The Apache community provides support for the open-source version.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
There is plenty of community support available online.
The documentation and community support for Redis are very strong, making troubleshooting quicker.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Since Redis is quite stable and well-documented, we have not needed much support, but when required, the response has been helpful.
Sde 2 at Netaji Subhash Engineering College
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Apache Kafka offers scalable solutions with Kubernetes, efficiently handling large data and users across industries, especially finance.
Sentiment score
7.8
Redis excels in horizontal and vertical scaling, offering clustering, sharding, and compatibility with Azure and AWS for enterprise adaptability.
Customers have not faced issues with user growth or data streaming needs.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
For traffic spikes, Apache Kafka naturally helps by buffering events, allowing consumers to catch up instead of immediately overwhelming downstream services.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
I need to enable my solution with high availability and scalability.
Data Architect at Ascendion
Data migration and changes to application-side configurations are challenging due to the lack of automatic migration tools in a non-clustered legacy system.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I scale Redis horizontally using clustering and sharding, where data is distributed across multiple nodes to handle higher traffic and larger data sets.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
With features such as clustering and replication, it can handle high traffic and a large database very effectively.
Sde 2 at Netaji Subhash Engineering College
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Apache Kafka is stable and reliable, efficiently handling high data volumes with minimal issues and high user satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.8
Redis is stable, handles heavy loads, offers high availability, and uses persistence mechanisms, making it a trusted choice.
Testing changes in lower environments before production rollout and verifying replication health and cluster stability is essential.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Apache Kafka is stable.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
This feature of Apache Kafka has helped enhance our system stability when handling high volume data.
DevOps Engineer
Redis is fairly stable.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Kafka needs improvements in duplicate management, UI, troubleshooting, cloud integration, messaging control, ZooKeeper dependency, and management tools.
Redis users face challenges with scalability, GUI, documentation, security, and seek enhancements in monitoring, analytics, and multi-tenancy features.
The performance angle is critical, and while it works in milliseconds, the goal is to move towards microseconds.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Apache Kafka groups could introduce themes or profiles of configuration to help manage this complexity without needing expertise.
Senior Principal Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Data persistence and recovery face issues with compatibility across major versions, making upgrades possible but downgrades not active.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Redis itself does not enforce consistency with the primary database, so developers need to carefully design cache invalidation strategies.
Software Engineer at ValueMomentum
One issue is cache invalidation. Keeping cache data consistent with the source of truth can be tricky, especially in distributed systems.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
 

Setup Cost

Apache Kafka is open-source and affordable, but managed services and support can incur additional costs.
Redis pricing depends on memory, cluster size, and infrastructure, with higher costs than SQL due to RAM usage.
From a price perspective, if you are asking about Apache Kafka, I would rate it a nine.
Senior Principal Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
The open-source version of Apache Kafka results in minimal costs, mainly linked to accessing documentation and limited support.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Its pricing is reasonable.
Since we use an open-source version of Redis, we do not experience any setup costs or licensing expenses.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The costs are primarily driven by memory consumption and cluster size, since Redis operates in-memory.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
The pricing is reasonable for the performance provided.
Sde 2 at Netaji Subhash Engineering College
 

Valuable Features

Apache Kafka provides scalable, fault-tolerant, real-time data streaming for reliable message processing and integration across platforms with open-source flexibility.
Redis offers low latency, high throughput, and scalability with rich data structures, ideal for real-time applications and caching.
Apache Kafka is effective when dealing with large volumes of data flowing at high speeds, requiring real-time processing.
Apache Kafka is particularly valuable for managing high levels of transactions.
Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA
Regarding durability and reliability, messages are persisted, so temporary consumer failures do not automatically lead to data loss, which is valuable in financial workflows where losing events is unacceptable.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
It functions similarly to a foundational building block in a larger system, enabling native integration and high functionality in core data processes.
Data Engineer at a photography company with 1,001-5,000 employees
First is its in-memory preference, as Redis is extremely fast, making it ideal for caching and session management where low latency is critical.
Software Engineer at ValueMomentum
Real API latency improved from around two seconds to approximately 450 milliseconds for P99.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
 

Categories and Ranking

Apache Kafka
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (5th)
Redis
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (4th), Managed NoSQL Databases (6th), In-Memory Data Store Services (1st), Vector Databases (4th), AI Software Development (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Apache Kafka and Redis aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Apache Kafka is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 4.0%, up 2.8% compared to last year.
Redis, on the other hand, focuses on In-Memory Data Store Services, holds 22.0% mindshare, up 16.9% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Kafka4.0%
Apache Flink8.9%
Databricks8.1%
Other79.0%
Streaming Analytics
In-Memory Data Store Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Redis22.0%
Amazon ElastiCache17.4%
Google Cloud Memorystore13.5%
Other47.1%
In-Memory Data Store Services
 

Featured Reviews

Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Event-driven workflows have improved payment processing and reduced latency across services
One area for improvement in Apache Kafka is operational complexity. Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise. Debugging and observability can be complex in large systems, as troubleshooting issues such as consumer lag, offset management problems, or uneven partition distribution can become challenging. The learning curve is relatively steep, requiring a good understanding of concepts such as partition, consumer group, offset commit, and delivery guarantees to avoid subtle production issues. One area where Apache Kafka could improve is the developer experience around debugging and tracing events end to end. In distributed systems, when an event passes through multiple topics and consumer services, troubleshooting can become time-consuming. Better built-in observability for tracing event flows across services would be very useful.
Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Caching has accelerated complex workflows and delivers low latency for high-traffic microservices
A few features of Redis that I use on a day-to-day basis and feel are among the best are extremely low latency and high throughput. Since Redis is in-memory, it makes it ideal for cases such as caching and rate limiting where response time is critical. TTL expiry support is very useful in Redis as it allows me to automatically evict stale data without manual cleanup, which is something I use heavily in my caching strategy. Another point I can mention is that the rich data structures such as strings, hashes, and even sorted sets are very powerful. I have used strings for caching responses and counters, whereas I have used hashes for storing structured objects. One more feature I can tell you about is atomic operations. Redis guarantees atomicity for operations such as incrementing a counter, which is very useful for rate limiting and avoiding race conditions in distributed systems. Finally, I want to emphasize that Redis is easy to scale and integrate, whether through clustering or using a distributed cache across microservices. Redis has impacted my organization positively by providing default support that is very useful. For metrics, in one of my core systems, introducing Redis as a distributed cache helped me achieve around an 80% cache hit rate, which reduced repeated downstream services. Real API latency also improved from around two seconds to approximately 450 milliseconds for P99. It also helped reduce the load on dependent services and databases, which improved overall system reliability.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise51
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?
Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?
Its pricing is reasonable. It's not always about cost, but about meeting specific needs.
What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?
The long-term data storage feature in Apache Kafka depends on the setting, but I believe the maximum duration is seven days.
What needs improvement with Redis?
Overall, Redis is a powerful and reliable tool, but there are a few areas for improvement. One limitation is that Redis is memory-based, so scaling can become expensive compared to disk-based syste...
What is your primary use case for Redis?
My main use case for Redis is caching frequently accessed data to improve performance and reduce database load. For example, I cache API responses and user-related data so that repeated requests ca...
What advice do you have for others considering Redis?
My main advice for those looking into using Redis is to focus on the use case; Redis excels where low latency is critical, such as caching, session management, or real-time features, rather than us...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Redis Enterprise
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
1. Twitter 2. GitHub 3. StackOverflow 4. Pinterest 5. Snapchat 6. Craigslist 7. Digg 8. Weibo 9. Airbnb 10. Uber 11. Slack 12. Trello 13. Shopify 14. Coursera 15. Medium 16. Twitch 17. Foursquare 18. Meetup 19. Kickstarter 20. Docker 21. Heroku 22. Bitbucket 23. Groupon 24. Flipboard 25. SoundCloud 26. BuzzFeed 27. Disqus 28. The New York Times 29. Walmart 30. Nike 31. Sony 32. Philips
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Kafka vs. Redis and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
896,034 professionals have used our research since 2012.