Decodable vs Kafka Streams
Decodable
decodable.coKafka Streams
kafka.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Decodable | Kafka Streams |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.01/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Stream Analytics Software | 8.1 (#10) | 7.9 (#15) |
| Deployment | Customers can use Decodable-hosted infrastructure or a Bring Your Own Cloud deployment option. | Kafka Streams applications can be deployed to containers, virtual machines, bare metal, or cloud environments. |
| Founded | 2019 | 1999 |
| Integrations | The connector library includes systems such as Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, Apache Iceberg, and Snowflake, including Debezium-powered CDC. | Kafka's ecosystem includes tools for stream processing, Hadoop integration, monitoring, and deployment, and Kafka Connect provides connectors for external systems. |
| Processing | SQL supports transformations, filtering, stateful joins, and complex event processing. | Kafka Streams processes and analyzes data stored in Kafka, including event-time processing, windowing, and real-time application-state queries. |
| Security | Decodable says its information security program complies with SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR, and that reports can be requested from [email protected]. | Kafka Streams natively integrates with Kafka security features, including encryption in transit, client authentication, and client authorization. |
| Support | Free includes community Slack and chat support with best-effort response; Enterprise includes dedicated Slack or Teams, chat, email, and Zoom support around the clock. | The Kafka project provides user, developer, JIRA, and commit mailing lists for community support and project communication. |
Plans
In their own words
Decodable
Decodable is a managed, serverless platform for real-time ETL, ELT, and stream processing, built on Apache Flink and Debezium. It lets teams create pipelines in SQL, Java, or Python and manage them through a UI, CLI, APIs, or dbt. SQL supports transformations, filtering, stateful joins, and complex event processing. Pipelines process data exactly once by default and can resume after a stop or failure. Connectors include Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, Apache Iceberg, and Snowflake, with Debezium-powered change data capture. Teams can use Decodable-hosted infrastructure or a Bring Your Own Cloud deployment. The free plan costs nothing and does not expire or require a credit card; it includes 24 hours or 10GiB of stream retention, 20 streams, and four running tasks. On Demand costs $0.12 a month, billed monthly, and Enterprise costs $0.10 a year, billed annually with committed capacity. Decodable is available via API, web, and self-hosted deployment.
Kafka Streams
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.