Apache Kafka vs Apache Samza
Apache Kafka
kafka.apache.org
Apache Samza
samza.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Apache Kafka | Apache Samza |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Streaming Analytics Software | 7.8 (#10) | 7.8 (#11) |
| Spec score · Stream Processing Software | 7.8 (#12) | 7.8 (#13) |
| Deployment | 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. | Samza supports deployment on YARN, Kubernetes, or as a standalone library, and its documentation describes running applications across public clouds, containerized environments, and bare-metal hardware. |
| Founded | 1999 | 2013 |
| Integrations | Kafka Connect integrates with hundreds of event sources and sinks; the homepage names Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, and AWS S3 as examples. | Built-in integrations include Apache Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Azure Event Hubs, Elasticsearch, and Apache Hadoop, and custom sources can also be integrated. |
| Security | The project describes Kafka as secure; the ASF directs vulnerability reports to its security page. | The background documentation says Samza works with YARN, which supports Hadoop’s security model, and uses Linux cgroups for resource isolation. |
| Support | The Apache Software Foundation says it does not provide formal or commercial support for its software packages. | The project directs users to a user mailing list subscribed to by Samza users, contributors, and committers. |
Plans
In their own words
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.
Apache Samza
Apache Samza is a free, open-source distributed framework for applications that process data from multiple sources in real time. It supports stateless and stateful workloads, using a scalable, fault-tolerant state store for retained application state. Developers can use the high-level Streams API, lower-level Task API, Samza SQL or an Apache Beam API; Beam support for Python and Go is described as work in progress. Java and Scala applications can embed Samza as a lightweight client library. Built-in integrations include Apache Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Azure Event Hubs, Elasticsearch and Apache Hadoop, with custom sources also supported. Samza runs on YARN, Kubernetes or as a standalone library across public-cloud, containerized and bare-metal environments. Host affinity and incremental checkpointing help recover tasks and their state after failures. Processing is at least once. The project supports SQL processing and event-time windows, and its documentation describes applications with several terabytes of state and thousands of cores. Samza is self-hosted on Linux and distributed as source artifacts and through Maven; there is no binary release at this time.