Apache Kafka vs RisingWave
Apache Kafka
kafka.apache.org
RisingWave
risingwave.comSide by side
| Figure | Apache Kafka | RisingWave |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.23/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Streaming Analytics Software | 7.8 (#10) | 8.1 (#6) |
| Spec score · Event Streaming Platforms | 7.8 (#12) | 8.0 (#9) |
| Spec score · Stream Processing Software | 7.8 (#12) | 8.0 (#11) |
| 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. | Self-managed deployments support Docker, Kubernetes with Helm charts, cloud VMs, and on-premises bare-metal servers. |
| Founded | 1999 | 2021 |
| Security | The project describes Kafka as secure; the ASF directs vulnerability reports to its security page. | RisingWave security guidance covers TLS/SSL in transit, S3 encryption at rest, certificate or password authentication, role-based grants, and SQL-based data masking. |
| Support | The Apache Software Foundation says it does not provide formal or commercial support for its software packages. | RisingWave offers standard support on Basic, premium 24x7 support as an option on Pro, and premium support with SLA and quarterly success reviews for self-managed deployments. |
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.
RisingWave
RisingWave is a distributed SQL platform for ingesting, transforming, and serving real-time data. Its SQL interface is wire-compatible with PostgreSQL, so PostgreSQL clients, drivers, and tools can connect. New events incrementally refresh materialized views. Barrier-based checkpointing and consistent snapshots support exactly-once processing, while data is persisted in S3-compatible object storage and connector offsets are checkpointed for delivery durability. RisingWave lists 31+ native connectors, including Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Iceberg, Snowflake, BigQuery, S3, Redis, and Elasticsearch. Self-managed deployments are Apache 2.0 open source, with Docker, Kubernetes, cloud VM, and on-premises options. The hosted Basic plan is $0.23 a month, pay-as-you-go, limited to 64 cores and available in select regions; a free plan and 7-day trial are also listed. Basic includes standard support. Premium 24x7 support can be purchased with Pro, while self-managed deployments offer premium support with an SLA and quarterly success reviews. Listed platforms include API, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, and web.