# Apache Kafka

53 Hacker News commenters recommended Apache Kafka and 55 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Durable, horizontally scalable messaging and event streaming platform that people reuse across many systems. Caveat: painful to operate and usually only worth it at large scale.

## Why people recommend it

- Scales horizontally under heavy load (3 comments): "From a performance POV, Kafka scales horizontally, and appends only need negligible locking." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179638)) "Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46194230)) "made Twitter stable under the load of several hundred million users" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352638))
- Battle-tested with many known solutions (3 comments): "a benefit of using well known software like Kafka is a lot of problems you will run into have solutions/guidance already available" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363153)) "We built TBMQ on Kafka because it's battle-tested at scale across the industry" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47233394)) "OSS projects that scale well, say Linux, Postgres, Kafka, redis" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47942867))
- Useful features out of the box (2 comments): "Kafka has that out of the box. Where kafka starts to come apart is how to set it up." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148472)) "anything else a Kafka-like comes with out of the box" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767560))

## What people warn about

- Heavy to operate and resource-hungry (5 comments): "It's very good at what it does, but painful to manage and usually not worth the pain for anyone who's not in a mega enterprise." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47458994)) "Kafka I will grant you is a lot to operate, but I would not choose Kafka unless I have a Kafka-shaped problem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383588)) "Kafka is... a lot. If you need what it provides, then it's great." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733415))
- Confusing APIs and setup gotchas (3 comments): "One of the secret traps of Kafka is that it tried to be a collection of nice primitives without that much built on top" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45803218)) "Kafka's apis are full of landmines and gotchas, and you can do much better from a UX perspective" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449654)) "devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193191))
- Buggy clients and poor performance (2 comments): "Some poor quality software with bad performance, but an established piece of tech regardless." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46647563)) "Kafka clients for several languages are pretty much unusable due to bugs and/or performance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541064))
- Head-of-line blocking under concurrency (2 comments): "Kafka for head of line (HoL) blocking under concurrent events can be an issue though" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259683)) "It's the very architecture of Kafka itself due to the notorious head of line problem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146630))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [NATS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nats.md): 34 recommend
- [Redpanda](https://hackerapproved.com/p/redpanda.md): 17 recommend
- [RabbitMQ](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rabbitmq.md): 13 recommend
- [PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgresql-listen-notify.md): 13 recommend
- [S2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/s2-lite.md): 9 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Apache Kafka", https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-kafka/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).