Apache Kafka vs Apache Spark
Apache Kafka
kafka.apache.org
Apache Spark
spark.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Apache Kafka | Apache Spark |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Streaming Analytics Software | 7.8 (#10) | 8.1 (#5) |
| Spec score · Stream Processing Software | 7.8 (#12) | 8.2 (#7) |
| 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. | Spark documents standalone, Hadoop YARN, and Kubernetes deployment options. |
| Founded | 1999 | 2009 |
| Integrations | Kafka Connect integrates with hundreds of event sources and sinks; the homepage names Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, and AWS S3 as examples. | The listed ecosystem includes pandas, TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, Delta Lake, and Apache Iceberg. |
| License | The Apache Software Foundation identifies Apache License 2.0 as a widely adopted open-source license. | The project website states Apache Spark is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. |
| Security | The project describes Kafka as secure; the ASF directs vulnerability reports to its security page. | Security features such as authentication are not enabled by default, and the documentation says deployments are not secure by default. |
| Support | The Apache Software Foundation says it does not provide formal or commercial support for its software packages. | The project directs users to mailing lists and community resources for help. |
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 Spark
Apache Spark is a free, open-source engine for large-scale data analytics. It processes batches and real-time streams using Python, SQL, Scala, Java, or R. Spark SQL runs distributed ANSI SQL queries on structured tables and unstructured data such as JSON or images; MLlib provides machine-learning algorithms for local use or cluster scale. The project also describes exploratory analysis on petabyte-scale data without downsampling. Listed ecosystem components include pandas, TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, Delta Lake, and Apache Iceberg. Deployment options include standalone, Hadoop YARN, and Kubernetes. Spark runs on Windows and UNIX-like systems, including Linux and macOS, when a supported Java version is available. The 4.2.0 documentation lists Java 17, 21, or 25, Scala 2.13, Python 3.10+, and R 4.0+ (deprecated). Spark Connect separates client applications from clusters for remote access. Security is not enabled by default; Spark supports TLS for RPC connections and encryption of temporary local-disk data. The project is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0.