Canal vs Maxwell's Daemon

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.

Maxwell's Daemon is a free, open-source, self-hosted Linux tool for moving MySQL changes into streaming systems. It reads MySQL binary logs and emits database changes as JSON for Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, SNS, NATS, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, BigQuery, RabbitMQ, Redis, and other destinations. Listed uses include ETL, database change auditing, cache building or expiration, search indexing, and communication between services. Filtering can select databases, tables, and column values, while JavaScript filters handle custom row filtering and data changes. When encryption is enabled, messages use AES/CBC/PKCS5PADDING with a user-provided key and base64-encoded values. Metrics can be exposed through logging, JMX, HTTP, or Datadog; HTTP endpoints cover metrics, Prometheus, health checks, ping, and diagnostics. Maxwell supports schema evolution and an initial snapshot. Deployment options include command line, Docker, binary distribution, and Homebrew. Requirements include JRE 11 or later, supported MySQL versions from 5.1 through 8, and Kafka 0.8.2 or later when Kafka is used.