Kafka vs Message Queues: Key Differences

The key difference between Kafka and traditional message queues lies in their design and purpose. Traditional message queues are typically used for message transport, with point-to-point or publish/subscribe patterns. These queues ensure message reliability, order, and persistence, and usually have low latency.

Kafka is a distributed streaming platform designed for processing large-scale data streams, providing high throughput, low latency, and horizontal scalability. It uses a publish/subscribe model but also offers additional functionalities such as data storage, data partitioning, and data replication. Kafka is best suited for large-scale real-time data processing and analysis scenarios, such as log collection and monitoring data.