Apache Camel vs Apache Kafka

Likelihood to Recommend

Message brokering across different systems, with transactionality and the ability to have fine tuned control over what happens using Java (or other languages), instead of a heavy, proprietary languages.One situation that it doesn't fit very well (as far as I have experienced) is when your workflow requires significant data mapping. While possible when using Java tooling, some other visual data mapping tools in other integration frameworks are easier to work with.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Financial Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Despite the disadvantages I list, I really believe that Kafka is the right choice whenever you need a queueing or message broker system. Kafka is way too battle-tested and scales too well to ever not consider it. The only exception is if your use case requires many, many small topics. Also, Kafka doesn't support delay queues out of the box and so you will need to "hack" it through special code on the consumer side.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Internet Company, 201-500 employees

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Pros

Camel has an easy learning curve. It is fairly well documented and there are about 5-6 books on Camel.
There is a large user group and blogs devoted to all things Camel and the developers of Camel provide quick answers and have also been very quick to patch Camel, when bugs are reported.
Camel integrates well with well known frameworks like Spring, and other middleware products like Apache Karaf and Servicemix.
There are over 150 components for the Camel framework that help integrate with diverse software platforms.
Camel is also good for creating microservices.

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Surjit Sen

Senior Software Consultant at Randstad

Cox CommunicationsBroadcast Media, 10,001+ employees

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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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Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employees

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Cons

I find the "seda" endpoint to be less obvious that it is doing multi-threading than Spring Integration's executor mechanism.
Integration with Spring Beans is pretty good, but I believe SI's is a bit better (for obvious reasons, both being Spring products).
SI's use support is probably a bit better/faster and I believe the user base is larger so that there are most questions/answers for SI on StackOverflow

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Defense & Space Company, 11-50 employees

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Still a bit inmature, some clients have required recoding in the last few versions
New feaures coming very fast, several upgrades a year may be required
Not many commercial companies provide support

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Juan Francisco Tavira

Global Technology Centre - Middleware

ProdubanFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Apache Kafka 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Kafka is quickly becoming core product of the organization, indeed it is replacing older messaging systems. No better alternatives found yet

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Juan Francisco Tavira

Global Technology Centre - Middleware

ProdubanFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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Support

No score

No answers yet

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Apache Kafka 10.0

Based on 2 answers

We use Heroku to host Pulsar and they have tons of Kafka experts that have helped us tune every little setting and give us advice via email or live chat (if you pay for premium support).

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Internet Company, 201-500 employees

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Alternatives Considered

We chose Apache Camel because it was lightweight, easy to get started with and because it had a groovy DSL since we were a grails shop when we started using it.

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Akmal Muqeeth

Lead Software Engineer

BrighterInternet, 51-200 employees

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Confluent Cloud is still based on Apache Kafka but it has a subscription fee so, from a long term perspective, it is wiser to deploy your own Kafka instance that spans public and private cloud. Amazon Kinesis, Google Cloud Pub/Sub do not do well for a very number of messages and doesn't provide ordering guarantees as Apache Kafka or Confluent. Apache Kafka does better in scaling and availability than IBM MQ and Rabbit MQ.

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Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology

Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Apache Camel is open source and Java based. So if your engineering team is strong in Java this could be a good framework to adopt.
Apache camel is open source.
Camel could be run on OSGi containers like Karaf or Fuse.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering

Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Kafka is free
Speeds up ingest
Faster for UI to get data

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 51-200 employees

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Apache Camel vs Apache Kafka

Apache Camel

Apache Kafka

Pros

Cons

Likelihood to Renew

Support

Alternatives Considered

Return on Investment

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Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

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