Apache Kafka vs AutoMQ
Apache Kafka
kafka.apache.org
AutoMQ
automq.comSide by side
| Figure | Apache Kafka | AutoMQ |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $300/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · Event Streaming Platforms | 7.8 (#12) | 8.4 (#3) |
| 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. | AutoMQ Software can be deployed on premises, in private or public clouds, using a binary, Helm, or Docker Compose. |
| Founded | 1999 | 2022 |
| Security | The project describes Kafka as secure; the ASF directs vulnerability reports to its security page. | The security page describes TLS or mTLS for Kafka client connections, optional encryption at rest for AWS BYOC, and RBAC for AutoMQ Cloud control-plane operations. |
| What it does | Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform for data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. | AutoMQ is Kafka-compatible streaming software that runs Kafka on cloud object storage. |
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.
AutoMQ
AutoMQ is Kafka-compatible streaming software that runs Kafka on cloud object storage. It supports S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, MinIO, and Ceph, and can be deployed on premises or in private and public clouds by binary, Helm, or Docker Compose. AutoMQ states sub-10ms P99 latency and automatic scaling with traffic, including partition rebalancing across brokers. Table Topic can materialize Kafka topics as Iceberg or Delta Lake tables without ETL pipelines, for direct querying with Spark, Trino, or Flink. Managed Connector runs Kafka Connect workers in a customer’s Kubernetes environment, with logs and monitoring for throughput, task health, failures, and anomalies. The platform lists stream processing, schema registry, exactly-once delivery, a maximum 90-day retention period, and 300 connectors. Supported client languages include Java, C/C++, Go, Python, and NodeJS. Pro costs $300 a month; Enterprise pricing is by contact. There is no free plan, but a 30-day free trial requires no credit card.