Apache Pinot vs Kafka Streams

Apache Pinot is a free, open-source distributed OLAP datastore for real-time analytics and user-facing workloads. It ingests streaming data from Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, and AWS Kinesis, plus batch data from Hadoop, Spark, Amazon S3, Azure ADLS, and Google Cloud Storage. Streaming and batch sources can be combined into one queryable table. Pinot provides SQL through a query editor and REST API, with JDBC, Java, Python, and Golang clients for applications. Project materials advertise P90 query latency in the tens of milliseconds on petabyte-scale data and capacity for hundreds of thousands of concurrent queries per second. Logical namespaces provide multitenancy. Security features include HTTP Basic Authentication, ACLs, TLS, mutual TLS, and row-level security filters in version 1.4.0 and later. Superset, Tableau, and Power BI can connect as BI tools. Official installation guidance covers Docker and Kubernetes with Helm. The self-hosted plan is listed at free.

Kafka Streams is a free client library for building applications and microservices that use data stored in Kafka clusters. It processes Kafka data with event-time handling, windowing, and real-time queries of application state. The Streams DSL provides operations such as mapping, filtering, joins, and aggregations, while the Processor API supports custom processors and state stores. Fault-tolerant local state supports stateful work such as windowed joins and aggregations, and the library offers exactly-once processing semantics. Applications can run on one machine or scale across multiple machines, and can be deployed in containers, virtual machines, on bare metal, or in cloud environments. Kafka Streams uses Kafka as its internal messaging layer and does not require a separate processing cluster. It supports Java and Scala and integrates with Kafka security features for encryption in transit, client authentication, and authorization. The software is licensed under Apache License 2.0. The Apache Software Foundation says it does not sell its software or provide formal or commercial support for its packages; project communication is available through community mailing lists.