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.
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Postman
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Postman, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their flagship API development and management free to small teams and independent developers. Higher tiers (Postman Pro and Postman Enterprise) support API management, as well as team collaboration, extended support and other advanced features.
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Pricing
Apache Kafka
Postman
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Postman Free Plan
$0.00 US Dollars
Postman Basic Plan
$12 US Dollars
per month per user
Postman Professional Plan
$29 US Dollars
per month per user
Postman Enterprise Plan
$99 US Dollars
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache Kafka
Postman
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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1. Postman Free plan: Start designing, developing, and testing APIs at no cost for teams of up to three people.
2. Postman Basic plan: Collaborate with your team to design, develop, and test APIs faster; $12/month per user, billed annually
3. Postman Professional plan: Centrally manage the entire API workflow; $29/month per user, billed annually
4. Postman Enterprise plan: Securely manage, organize, and accelerate API-first development at scale; $99/month per user, billed annually
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Community Pulse
Apache Kafka
Postman
Features
Apache Kafka
Postman
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
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.
Postman is good for organising your API credentials, vendor settings, environments etc. It's also a good way of getting stared with APIs as you get to use a GUI which can help you understand what we mean by a 'body' or 'bearer token'. I think people generally gravitate towards GUI tools for getting started in a new technology area.
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).
It has opened a door for me to explore more out of it, as it is associated with so many APIs that I never felt any difficulty in finding the right API template, which are well organized and easily available.
It is very secure to use and provides great services which are user-friendly.
Due to this software I have got rid of the excessive emails and the slack channels, Now I am using my own private API and even it give me an option to produce my personal Postman’s API Builder from its Private API Network and this features has shared my excessive workload.
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
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
1. Friendly user friendly - when I started using Postman, I was a beginner to the API world, and it gave me a friendly view to begin its usage 2. Postman offers many features, including API testing, monitoring, documentation, and mock servers 3. Environment variables simplify testing across multiple environments (dev, prod) without repetitive configuration.
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.
There is a lot of in-depth documentation for Postman available online, including detailed guides with screenshots and videos. They provide example APIs for new users to explore while learning how to use the tool. Generally, bugs in the client are quickly addressed through frequent free updates. Community and professional support options are available - most of the time, the free/community level support is adequate
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.
Previous to using Postman, I would either use browser tools directly, or write an in-house tool to send requests. Postman eliminates that need while providing a much better experience and more features. At the base level, Postman is as simple as typing in the address as you would in a browser. Authentication can be provided simply as well.
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.
Postman is free (although there's a paid tier that offers more features) so using it for testing APIs comes with little to no risk (besides learning curve).
The learning curve is a little steep for non-developer users, but developers should find it easy to pick up and use right out of the box, so to speak.
