What is Kafka used for?

Kafka is an open-source platform for distributed event streaming, used in data pipelines, streaming analytics and data integration. It is a good fit for real-time data pipelines between services, streaming analytics on event data and decoupling microservices with an event backbone.

Is Kafka open source?

Yes. Kafka is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at apache/kafka and is written mainly in Java.

Yes. Kafka is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Kafka?

Yes. Kafka can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Kafka an alternative to?

Kafka is an open-source alternative to Striim, Confluent and Amazon Kinesis. Other open-source alternatives to Striim include RisingWave, Debezium and Duckle.

Is Kafka actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Kafka was on 2 October 2026. The project has 34k stars on GitHub.

Kafka: open-source alternative to Striim, Confluent

About Kafka

Apache Kafka is a platform for distributed event streaming. Teams use it to move and process streams of events for data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration and business-critical applications. The code lives in the Apache Software Foundation repository, is written mainly in Java with Scala for parts of the broker, and is released under the Apache-2.0 license.

Kafka is installed software that you run yourself. The project builds and tests against recent Java versions, supports Scala 2.13 only, and documents how to build a JAR and start a broker through its quickstart. The repository also contains client and streams modules, along with test tooling for unit and integration runs. Because Kafka is operated as infrastructure, adopters typically run clusters on their own servers or on Kubernetes, though managed services from other vendors exist.

Key features

Distributed event streaming platform
Durable publish and subscribe topics
Client libraries and a streams module
Suited to data pipelines and integration
Runs on Java with Scala 2.13
Quickstart for building and running a broker

Good fit for

→Real-time data pipelines between services
→Streaming analytics on event data
→Decoupling microservices with an event backbone

Built with: Java
Tags: kafka; event-streaming; messaging; data-pipelines; java; scala; streaming; apache

Kafka: questions and answers

What is Kafka used for?: Kafka is an open-source platform for distributed event streaming, used in data pipelines, streaming analytics and data integration. It is a good fit for real-time data pipelines between services, streaming analytics on event data and decoupling microservices with an event backbone.
Is Kafka open source?: Yes. Kafka is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at apache/kafka and is written mainly in Java.
Is Kafka free?: Yes. Kafka is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Kafka?: Yes. Kafka can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Kafka an alternative to?: Kafka is an open-source alternative to Striim, Confluent and Amazon Kinesis. Other open-source alternatives to Striim include RisingWave, Debezium and Duckle.
Is Kafka actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Kafka was on 2 October 2026. The project has 34k stars on GitHub.