Canal vs IBM CDC Replication

Canal is a free, self-hosted project that parses MySQL binary logs so applications can subscribe to and consume database changes incrementally. It acts like a MySQL replica, requesting binlog data from a master and parsing the events. Listed uses include database mirroring and real-time backup, index maintenance, cache refresh, and business-logic processing. The README lists source versions MySQL 5.1.x, 5.5.x, 5.6.x, 5.7.x, and 8.0.x. Canal can send change records to Kafka and RocketMQ; the quick start also lists RabbitMQ and Pulsar server modes. Its Protocol Buffers 3.0 client-server design has clients for Java, C#, Go, and Python. Canal Admin provides a web interface for managing configuration, tasks, and logs, and the project lists native Prometheus monitoring. Docker images and a Docker QuickStart are available, but the default setup runs only one Canal instance per Docker instance. The project is licensed under Apache-2.0.

IBM CDC Replication has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.