Apache Kafka vs. Apigee Edge

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Apache Kafka
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Apache Kafka is an open-source stream processing platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java. The Kafka event streaming platform is used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.N/A
Apigee Edge
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Apigee Edge is an API management platform now owned and offered by Google, since Google acquired Apigee in 2016.N/A
Pricing
Apache KafkaApigee Edge
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache KafkaApigee Edge
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache KafkaApigee Edge
Features
Apache KafkaApigee Edge
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
Apache Kafka
-
Ratings
Apigee Edge
9.4
Ratings
12% above category average
API access control00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Rate limits and usage policies00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
API usage data00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
API user onboarding00 Ratings9.90 Ratings
API versioning00 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Usage billing and payments00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
API monitoring and logging00 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache KafkaApigee Edge
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM MQ
IBM MQ
Score 9.6 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM MQ
IBM MQ
Score 9.6 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache KafkaApigee Edge
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(0 ratings)
6.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache KafkaApigee Edge
Likelihood to Recommend
For brokering messages, Confluent Kafka is well suited since it offers a managed solution ready to use. Scenarios where the solution is not very well suited are for example, where pricing is an issue. The solution costs quite a lot for basic usage (for example: for 3 clusters, pricing is above 100k$ a year).
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Apigee has been great when managing the quota based access to the APIs. It is really good and suitable when considering proxying the in-house server endpoints access with the way it provides security with API Key validation and OAuth.
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Pros
  • Apache Kafka is able to handle a large number of I/Os (writes) using 3-4 cheap servers.
  • It scales very well over large workloads and can handle extreme-scale deployments (eg. Linkedin with 300 billion user events each day).
  • The same Kafka setup can be used as a messaging bus, storage system or a log aggregator making it easy to maintain as one system feeding multiple applications.
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  • Manage user access, we can allow specific access to users based on their need and even customize requests of services based on user requirements.
  • Allow branding, so that SFO can maintain its look and feel but still get the support and functionalities we need from Apigee.
  • Integrates well with other platforms we use.
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Cons
  • The Kafka Tool is a community-made Java application that looks and feels from the past century.
  • Logging can be confusing. This certainly shows when we have to do troubleshooting.
  • Hybrid scenarios - pub/sub, but there are services in and outside a Kubernetes cluster. Then there are a ~3 options, but only 2 (the harder ones) are production-safe.
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  • Might need to bring in more features that a gateway performs, such a orchestration to some extent.
  • May seem to be costly at start for small scale enterprises.
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Likelihood to Renew
Kafka has suited our use case very well so far. Going forward we are planning to expand our platform manifold so the load on Kafka and our reliance on Kafka is going to increase only.
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I am not the one deciding whether to use apigee or not really. But personally, I would recommend the use of it as developing APIs on it is easy. And as a mediator between backend servers, we could easily modify request and responses in it without touching any backend code while having a centralize gateway to access our backend APIs too.
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Usability
Apache Kafka is highly recommended to develop loosely coupled, real-time processing applications. Also, Apache Kafka provides property based configuration. Producer, Consumer and broker contain their own separate property file
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Support has helped us to resolved all the queries and community support was also good.
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Support Rating
Support for Apache Kafka (if willing to pay) is available from Confluent that includes the same time that created Kafka at Linkedin so they know this software in and out. Moreover, Apache Kafka is well known and best practices documents and deployment scenarios are easily available for download. For example, from eBay, Linkedin, Uber, and NYTimes.
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Quite hard to get support, at least on the coding side, when we encounter blockers. But general concerns, they would schedule a call to you for them to get a whole picture of your concern. Albeit in my experience, bad really as they haven't replied about the progress, but otherwise seems to have been fixed.
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Alternatives Considered
Apache Kafka is built for scale. From high throughput and real-time data streaming, it has a strong advantage over RabbitMQ with its low latency. This put Apache Kafka at the forefront as the platform of choice for large datasets messaging and ensuring scalability when data scale up tremendously. RabbitMQ however has its strengths in traditional messaging. Routing and message delivery reliability are the bedrock of RabbitMQ and this is where RabbitMQ excels. In my previous workplace, RabbitMQ was of choice as reliability matters more than scale. In two words. Apache Kafka for scale, RabbitMQ for reliability. And for cloud deployment and large dataset messaging in what I am doing now, Apache Kafka is the default choice.
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Apigee is the best in the market in terms of API Analytics Apigee is having wonderful Documentation with short videos Security is a major concern and Apigee provides an easily configurable policy to secure API Quota and rate-limit is again very easy to configure on every API basis It provides various policies to transform the response from one form to another form e.g. JSON to XML or XML to JSON
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Return on Investment
  • Positive: bursts of traffic on special holidays are easy to handle because Kafka can absorb and buffer all the messages we need to process long enough to let an understaffed set of back-end services catch up on processing. Hard to put a number to it but we probably save $5k a month having fewer machines running.
  • Positive: makes decoupling the web and API services from the deeper back-end services easier by providing topics as an interface. This allowed us to split up our teams and have them develop independently of each other, speeding up software development.
  • Negative: our engineers have made mistakes such as accidentally dropping a few thousand messages due to the CLI being confusing to use, and as a result a customer lost some of their precious data. I'd say that was more our fault than Kafka's though.
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  • Unruly, difficult to maintain, unable to test, difficult to troubleshoot and debug. Every ticket that requires Apigee work increases stress and anxiety.
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