What users are saying about
97 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 9.1 out of 100
Based on 97 reviews and ratings
13 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 7.1 out of 100
Based on 13 reviews and ratings
Attribute Ratings
- Apache Kafka is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Usability, Support Rating
Likelihood to Recommend

9.3
Apache Kafka
93%
13 Ratings

7.5
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
75%
5 Ratings
Likelihood to Renew

9.0
Apache Kafka
90%
1 Rating

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
N/A
0 Ratings
Usability

10.0
Apache Kafka
100%
1 Rating

6.0
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
60%
1 Rating
Availability

Apache Kafka
N/A
0 Ratings

2.0
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
20%
2 Ratings
Performance

Apache Kafka
N/A
0 Ratings

6.0
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
60%
2 Ratings
Support Rating

8.6
Apache Kafka
86%
7 Ratings

7.0
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
70%
2 Ratings
Product Scalability

Apache Kafka
N/A
0 Ratings

10.0
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
100%
1 Rating
Likelihood to Recommend
Apache Kafka
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.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Internet Company, 201-500 employeesWSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
WSO2 ESB is an awesome product for companies looking to venture into the world of SOA with an ESB. They have a lot of other products too that can work really well with their carbon infrastructure. The interface is simple for deploying and managing proxy services. You can also write custom modules within the ESB using Java with IDE like Eclipse
Senior (Consultant) Software Engineer
Intermountain HealthcareHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees
Pros
Apache Kafka
- 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.

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employeesWSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
- One of the basic requirement of an ESB product is that it should be able to support transformation. WSO2 ESB provides support of XSLT, so you can transform your request to whatever format. Moreover, transformations like converting your xml payload into JSON and JSON payload to XML are out of the box available.
- WSO2 ESB provides a scheduler feature, by which you can configure your own scheduler to call a proxy service at a particular time of day or or initiate sequence.
- WSO2 ESB provides excellent error handling techniques, WSO2 ESB provides detailed error handling scenarios to tackle all the situations. WSO2 ESB also provides custom error handling by which you can make your own custom error message before sending it back to client.
Integration Engineer
W-integrateInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees
Cons
Apache Kafka
- 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.
DevOps Team Leader
CognyteInformation Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
- While it's easy to configure for a quick start, it is not so easy to deploy by yourself in a complex production scenario.
- Not very stable for production usage, we encountered several trivial bugs that make us believe that this product is still not widely adopted.
- Lack of a built in mechanism for auto-restart in case of an application server crash.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesPricing Details
Apache Kafka
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—Likelihood to Renew
Apache Kafka
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
Global Technology Centre - Middleware
ProdubanFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Usability
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka 10.0
Based on 1 answer
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
Senior Software Engineer
Accion LabsInformation Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 6.0
Based on 1 answer
Compared to competitors the overall experience has been fine

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesReliability and Availability
Apache Kafka
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 2.0
Based on 2 answers
Lack of auto-restart built-in capabilities. In case of running out of memory there are no built-in methods to recover from a crash, just for example, Oracle WebLogic Node Manager.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesPerformance
Apache Kafka
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 6.0
Based on 2 answers
The product is performing well and consuming few resources

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesSupport Rating
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka 8.6
Based on 7 answers
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.

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employeesWSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 7.0
Based on 2 answers
Our experience with the WSO2 support has beent satisfactory

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesAlternatives Considered
Apache Kafka
We really needed to get away from using a SQL database to act as a queue for processing records, so a new solution was needed. Kafka is a leading software application initially designed for queuing messages which is essentially what we were looking for. It has a great user community and is used across the industry. We also use and trust several other products from Confluent which helped seal the decision.
Senior System Engineer
NetDocumentsComputer Software, 201-500 employees
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
It's the only one truly open source and free.
Architecture Practice Manager
Gfi EspañaInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees
Scalability
Apache Kafka
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 10.0
Based on 1 answer
Adding a server node is really straightforward, there are just few point in the configuration files.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesReturn on Investment
Apache Kafka
- Kafka makes the messaging itself more reliable (as it has the distributed storage by itself and the message doesn't disappear even after it has been consumed).
- Kafka can support a much higher volume use case, without too much extra pressure on the existed hardware.

Verified User
Strategist in Information Technology
Package/Freight Delivery Company, 10,001+ employeesWSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
- Very well documented tutorials and case studies makes it easy to learn.
- It has a really supportive community
- It is fast and it can easily handle 300 tps of average use on a VM with 4Gig RAM
Software Architect
Persian SmartPathInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees