Apache Druid vs Apache Kafka
Apache Druid
druid.apache.orgApache Kafka
kafka.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Apache Druid | Apache Kafka |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Streaming Analytics Software | 9.0 (#2) | 7.8 (#10) |
| Deployment | Druid can run on commodity hardware in *NIX environments and is designed to run in AWS, GCP, Azure, and other cloud environments. | Kafka can run on bare-metal hardware, virtual machines, or containers, on premises or in the cloud, with self-managed or vendor-managed service options. |
| Integrations | Core extensions support systems and formats including S3, HDFS, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, Kafka, Kinesis, Avro, ORC, Parquet, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. | Kafka Connect integrates with hundreds of event sources and sinks; the homepage names Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, and AWS S3 as examples. |
| License | Apache Druid and its documentation are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. | The Apache Software Foundation identifies Apache License 2.0 as a widely adopted open-source license. |
| Security | Security features include TLS, authentication, and authorization, but they are disabled by default and the documentation says to configure them for production. | The project describes Kafka as secure; the ASF directs vulnerability reports to its security page. |
| Support | The project directs users to its community network for help using Druid. | The Apache Software Foundation says it does not provide formal or commercial support for its software packages. |
| What it does | Apache Druid is a real-time analytics database for sub-second queries on streaming and batch data at scale. | Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform for data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. |
Plans
In their own words
Apache Druid
Apache Druid is a free, open-source analytics database for querying streaming and batch data. It is designed to return OLAP queries in milliseconds, including on high-cardinality datasets with billions to trillions of rows. The project describes applications ranging from hundreds to 100,000 queries per second. Native Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis integrations support low-latency ingestion and querying as data arrives. Druid organizes ingested data into columnar, time-indexed, encoded and compressed storage. Queries can use Druid SQL or JSON-over-HTTP, and joins are available during ingestion or at query time. Its web console can load data, manage datasources and tasks, show server status and run queries. Extensions connect to storage, databases and formats including S3, HDFS, Azure, PostgreSQL, Avro, ORC and Parquet. Druid can be self-hosted on Linux, macOS and other Unix-like systems; Windows is not supported. The local quickstart needs at least 6 GiB of RAM and Java 17. Production security controls require configuration.
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event-streaming platform for data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. Applications can publish and subscribe to event streams, retain them durably, and process them either in real time or later. Kafka supports durable, fault-tolerant replication across availability zones, data centers, or geographic regions. Kafka Streams provides stateful operations, aggregations, windowing, joins, event-time processing, and exactly-once processing. Kafka Connect links hundreds of event sources and sinks, including Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, and AWS S3. Deployments can use bare metal, virtual machines, or containers, on premises or in the cloud, with self-managed or vendor-managed options. The project describes network-limited throughput, latency as low as 2 ms, and clusters of up to 1,000 brokers. Kafka is self-hosted, free, and open source under Apache License 2.0. A local quickstart requires Java 17 or later.