Redpanda Benchmarks Lower Latency Than Kafka, but Kafka Keeps Ecosystem Edge

A comparison of Redpanda 24.x and Apache Kafka 3.8 in KRaft mode reports Redpanda delivering roughly 72% lower p99 produce latency and 2.5 times higher per-broker throughput in the tested setup. Redpanda is built in C++ on the Seastar framework, pinning each shard to a CPU core and avoiding garbage collection pauses, while Kafka runs on the JVM and relies on the OS page cache and sendfile() for its consume path. Redpanda also starts serving traffic in under a second, compared with 8 to 22 seconds for Kafka, and its estimated cloud cost for a sample workload is about 27% lower. Kafka remains stronger on ecosystem breadth, including Kafka Streams, Connect, and ksqlDB, and it is licensed under Apache 2.0, whereas Redpanda uses the BSL 1.1 license with a free tier limited to three brokers.