Apache Kafka vs. Apache Solr

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Apache Kafka
Score 8.4 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
Apache Solr
Score 6.7 out of 10
N/A
Apache Solr is an open-source enterprise search server.N/A
Pricing
Apache KafkaApache Solr
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache KafkaApache Solr
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
Best Alternatives
Apache KafkaApache Solr
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Algolia
Algolia
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM MQ
IBM MQ
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM MQ
IBM MQ
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache KafkaApache Solr
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(18 ratings)
9.0
(10 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache KafkaApache Solr
Likelihood to Recommend
Apache
Apache Kafka is well-suited for most data-streaming use cases. Amazon Kinesis and Azure EventHubs, unless you have a specific use case where using those cloud PaAS for your data lakes, once set up well, Apache Kafka will take care of everything else in the background. Azure EventHubs, is good for cross-cloud use cases, and Amazon Kinesis - I have no real-world experience. But I believe it is the same.
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Apache
Solr spins up nicely and works effectively for small enterprise environments providing helpful mechanisms for fuzzy searches and facetted searching. For larger enterprises with complex business solutions you'll find the need to hire an expert Solr engineer to optimize the powerful platform to your needs. Internationalization is tricky with Solr and many hosting solutions may limit you to a latin character set.
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Pros
Apache
  • Really easy to configure. I've used other message brokers such as RabbitMQ and compared to them, Kafka's configurations are very easy to understand and tweak.
  • Very scalable: easily configured to run on multiple nodes allowing for ease of parallelism (assuming your queues/topics don't have to be consumed in the exact same order the messages were delivered)
  • Not exactly a feature, but I trust Kafka will be around for at least another decade because active development has continued to be strong and there's a lot of financial backing from Confluent and LinkedIn, and probably many other companies who are using it (which, anecdotally, is many).
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Apache
  • Easy to get started with Apache Solr. Whether it is tackling a setup issue or trying to learn some of the more advanced features, there are plenty of resources to help you out and get you going.
  • Performance. Apache Solr allows for a lot of custom tuning (if needed) and provides great out of the box performance for searching on large data sets.
  • Maintenance. After setting up Solr in a production environment there are plenty of tools provided to help you maintain and update your application. Apache Solr comes with great fault tolerance built in and has proven to be very reliable.
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Cons
Apache
  • Sometimes it becomes difficult to monitor our Kafka deployments. We've been able to overcome it largely using AWS MSK, a managed service for Apache Kafka, but a separate monitoring dashboard would have been great.
  • Simplify the process for local deployment of Kafka and provide a user interface to get visibility into the different topics and the messages being processed.
  • Learning curve around creation of broker and topics could be simplified
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Apache
  • These examples are due to the way we use Apache Solr. I think we have had the same problems with other NoSQL databases (but perhaps not the same solution). High data volumes of data and a lot of users were the causes.
  • We have lot of classifications and lot of data for each classification. This gave us several problems:
  • First: We couldn't keep all our data in Solr. Then we have all data in our MySQL DB and searching data in Solr. So we need to be sure to update and match the 2 databases in the same time.
  • Second: We needed several load balanced Solr databases.
  • Third: We needed to update all the databases and keep old data status.
  • If I don't speak about problems due to our lack of experience, the main Solr problem came from frequency of updates vs validation of several database. We encountered several locks due to this (our ops team didn't want to use real clustering, so all DB weren't updated). Problem messages were not always clear and we several days to understand the problems.
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Likelihood to Renew
Apache
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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Apache
No answers on this topic
Usability
Apache
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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Apache
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Apache
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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Apache
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Apache
I used other messaging/queue solutions that are a lot more basic than Confluent Kafka, as well as another solution that is no longer in the market called Xively, which was bought and "buried" by Google. In comparison, these solutions offer way fewer functionalities and respond to other needs.
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Apache
Apache Solr is a ready-to-use product addressing specific use cases such as keyword searches from a huge set of data documents.
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Return on Investment
Apache
  • Positive: Get a quick and reliable pub/sub model implemented - data across components flows easily.
  • Positive: it's scalable so we can develop small and scale for real-world scenarios
  • Negative: it's easy to get into a confusing situation if you are not experienced yet or something strange has happened (rare, but it does). Troubleshooting such situations can take time and effort.
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Apache
  • Improved response time in e-commerce websites.
  • Developer's job is easier with Apache Solr in use.
  • Customization in filtering and sorting is possible.
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