High-performance message brokering with excellent documentation and an easy setup
What is our primary use case?
I have worked with Redpanda for the past two to three months. Mainly in the tech industry or software industry, there's a huge rise of streaming data.
Redpanda serves as a very reliable and fast message broker, which lets you build applications asynchronously. The major use case is for my project specifically, we're using it for a monitoring system that we're building.
How has it helped my organization?
I haven't worked on enterprise-grade applications. It's a project for academic research for the college.
What is most valuable?
The industry standard for this kind of platform is Kafka. Confluent Kafka has acquired it. Kafka is an open-source platform built by Apache. Confluent is the commercial version of it.
The major improvement of Redpanda over Kafka is firstly, good documentation. Redpanda's documentation is very easily understandable, and they have a lot of examples. In addition to that, most of the setups include using another technology called Docker, which I am very familiar with.
Setting up technologies using Docker is very convenient to me, and Redpanda has provided many templates for that. Redpanda has its own built-in metrics exporter, making it easier to monitor and check performance.
What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++. C++ is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications.
What needs improvement?
Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good. Maybe due to the fact that it's a first prototype and was very recently released. However, from a product perspective, I do not have any problems.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Redpanda for the past two to three months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I am definitely satisfied with the stability provided by Redpanda.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In the free version, it's still working with containers itself. They've provided the template for one and three nodes for horizontal scaling.
For our project, we've set up five containers. The template is ready in the Dockerfile they provided. You just add the existing nodes and give them the respective configurations.
How are customer service and support?
I have not escalated any questions to technical support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The industry standard for this kind of platform is Kafka. Confluent Kafka has acquired it. Kafka is an open-source platform built by Apache. Confluent is the commercial version of it. I have worked with Kafka, so I pretty much know how it works. I found Redpanda's documentation and setup to be more straightforward.
How was the initial setup?
Once I learned about this platform, I read about it a bit and then I looked at how they set it up on their systems. It's a simple straightforward Dockerfile. If you have Docker installed on your system, you can just spin it up quickly without any issues.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Redpanda is actually a commercial platform, but they do provide free versions as well. I've been working only with the free versions.
What other advice do I have?
Anyone finishing their bachelor's degree in computer science engineering would have had some hands-on experience with Kafka and understand how it works. Shifting from Kafka to Redpanda would be very simple for them.
I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.
Takes less resources compared to Kafka and it is based on C++ and is native to the operating system
What is our primary use case?
The main use case is a message stream. Just to process the data with window processing.
How has it helped my organization?
Operationally, it is good.
Two projects use artificial intelligence in combination with Redpanda right now.
What is most valuable?
The best thing is that it takes less resources compared to Kafka. We have a bad experience with Kafka; we need to restart the services because it's built on Java and requires a huge space on servers.
Redpanda is based on C++ and is native to the operating system. Basically, it is memory efficient. We like it.
It's easy to learn to use Redpanda for the first time because it supports the Kafka client as a developer. It supports native Kafka clients.
And from the operations perspective, it's a pretty standard installation. The online community support is also available.
What needs improvement?
The command-line tools need to be improved. To quickly check the status of the topics and all.
For example, if I wanted to check how many messages are in a topic, there is a command, but we need to use different tools to get that information. It's not really built into the native tool.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for three years. I use version 25.3.3
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I never experienced any bugs. So far, so good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I tested it with ten-plus nodes, and it's highly scalable.
We are about 55 people, 12 people actively use it, and we use it for six products.
How are customer service and support?
I never needed to contact the customer service and support because it's working as expected.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We opted for Kafka for two reasons.
- One is we used to use Kafka, and we had to restart Kafka every quarter or so due to memory issues.
- Compared to Kafka, Redpanda is stable and resource consumption is also very effective. It takes less resources compared to other tools.
How was the initial setup?
It's very easy. The cluster setup is also very easy in Redpanda compared to others.
What about the implementation team?
What was our ROI?
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's free. Everybody can use it, only support is paid.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated three: Kafka, Redpanda, and ActiveMQ.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend Redpanda to others because it's easy to set up, consumes less resources, and is stable compared to other tools.
Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten because there is room for improvement. So far, it's nothing but a rewrite of Kafka. It needs improvement on some of the command-line tools. And the second thing is it doesn't have a management graphical user interface. That also needs improvement.
Cost effective, flexible solution for Kafka users
What do you like best about the product?
Redpanda has been a powerful part of our infrastructure, it enables us to have the scalability and reliability that we need while being low touch around administration and maintenance. The Redpanda team has done as excellent job delivering a high quality product, as well as providing excellent support, guidance and continuous product and service improvements. BYOC has provided us the flexibility of running their managed service on our account, which combined with a very efficient Kafka platform, and their tooling and support, means we can focus our time and money on delivering even more value to our customers, while still having the flexibility of an onsite solution.
What do you dislike about the product?
If you're a Confluent or Open Source Kafka user, there will be some differences to adjust to with regards to running it yourself, as the underlying implementation is not the same, but I think overall an improvement for users in terms of management and configuration.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Provides the backbone pipeline for our processing flows and connecting our various pieces of infrastructure together.
Quality software delivered by a quality team
What do you like best about the product?
Redpanda's team and their product have been nothing but a positive experience for our company. Our Redpanda BYOC cluster is on the frontline keeping mission critical systems up and running reliably. Throughout the entire time we have been running the cluster multiple team members have exclaimed how critical and stress relieving it has been to have Redpanda in our stack. Redpanda has simultaneously kept our systems running while also allowing us to speed up development on downstream systems. Alongside this we have had nothing but a positive experience with the Redpanda team. From the original POC and purchasing process all the way through the support relationship Redpanda has felt like they are another team inside our own company.
What do you dislike about the product?
Occassionally, the console ui has some less than great feature implementations however, the team is always quick to fix any issues.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use Redpanda to broker all of our billable events occurring at the company and processing them out to multiple downstream services and analytics stores.
Kafka as it Should be
What do you like best about the product?
Kafka-compatible in an easier to consume, faster and cheaper package. Great company to work with and delivers
What do you dislike about the product?
Redpanda are still adding features but also remaining innovative
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Streaming is at the heart of complex systems and for Fintechs this capability is critical yet also complex to implement, scale and manage.
Redpanda provides the heart of our streaming solutions - and as cloud hosted service removes much of the implementations and operational overhead.
Redpanda have taken the opportunity to learn from the open source project with a simpler and more scalable approach yet with kafka compatibility that support and integration into the wider kafka ecosytem
Game changer.
What do you like best about the product?
Redpanda has revolutionized our use of Kafka, enhancing everything from deployment simplicity to WASM transformations, and significantly boosting speed! After nearly a decade of Kafka in production and numerous outages, Redpanda has proven to be a remarkable replacement—truly a game changer.
Features like WASM transform are essential for harnessing its full potential and replacing outdated custom software that many of us still use today for that aspect.
The cloud version is the icing on the cake. It eliminates excessive billing and alleviates GDPR concerns for Europe, as everything operates on our cloud, under our security, exactly where we want it. The support has been phenomenal too; despite occasional bugs, the team addresses issues incredibly quickly.
Redpanda has fundamentally changed how we work, resolving many persistent issues we faced with Kafka. It's the dawn of a new era.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing for now really. Maybe the Kafka client that could be replaced at some point by a dedicated protocol.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Our entire data-pipeline is running via Redpanda. From analytics to event processing.
Amazing Product and ever more amazing people!
What do you like best about the product?
- > Easy to Setup and Use
- > True partners, than just another vendor - great support for custom design/ use-cases etc.
-> BYOC option
-> Great UI
-> Get a real-time platform setup and ready in almost no time.
-> Easy to integrate with other services.
What do you dislike about the product?
Been with the product and people for quite some time now and have seen the product evolve quite a lot with so much good improvements and add-ons.
A few missing pieces (which I believe are in the pipeline) are around programmatic ACL/Topic setup : something like a CRD so its easy to integrate and manage it into a CI/CD pipeline than do it manually on UI...but I am hopeful, this will come soon!
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Provides us with a streaming platform - easy to integrate and manage..to allow us to build important capabilities such as ML based Real time Fraud Engine etc.
Best Kafka solution in the market
What do you like best about the product?
I love their performance, scalability, deployment options...
What do you dislike about the product?
I would love to have more connectors to third party platforms
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use Redpanda to connect our services and storages. We are also starting to use it to connect our product and salesforce. It allows us to deliver realtime data platform
Rock Solid Technology with World Class Support
What do you like best about the product?
We're using RedPanda to build our reactive event-firehose for our upcoming video games. I've used Apache Kafka since it was open-sourced, and believe me when I tell you, there is no better version of the Kafka protocol on the market. The technology is rock solid from both a stability and performance aspect. I have the upmost respect for their engineering team at RedPanda. They absolutely obsess over the lowest level implementation detail, as opposed to "Just get it working". Performance to them is measured in the microseconds, not milliseconds. Their attention to detail gives me the confidence that our data isn't just going to get to its destination fast, but it will get there safely.
Their tooling (even for open source) makes our engineers far more productive than if they were using Apache Kafka. It's easy for our engineers to get a local RedPanda running to both try and implement new ideas. Finally, all of our existing tools work with RedPanda (Kafka) out-of-the-box without any sort of makeshift changes.
The support team at RedPanda have been oustanding at every step of our journey. There is no better team equipped to get you to where you need to go.
What do you dislike about the product?
Having leveraged RedPanda and their team for the past year, and their technology since it was first open-source, I can confidently say there's very little to nothing left on the table of desire.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
RedPanda is being used to build our self-service data analytics platform to empower our engineers to build better and more meaningful games.
Streamlining Data Management with Ease and Speed
What do you like best about the product?
Redpanda is very easy use, making data management a cinch. Its intuitive interface guides you through tasks effortlessly, whether you're importing, analyzing, or visualizing data. Migration from any other competitor is very straight forward and redpanda team is always there to help you and guide with any requests you may have.
What sets this app apart is its robust functionality. It offers a range of tools for data cleansing, transformation, advanced analytics, and visualization, all in one place.
Security is a top priority with built-in encryption and access controls, ensuring your data stays safe. Plus, the app grows with your needs, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.
In summary, the RedPanda simplifies data management without compromising on security or functionality. It's a must-have for anyone looking to make sense of their data quickly and easily.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are a few drawbacks worth mentioning. Firstly, the absence of kSQL functionality limits users who rely on this specific query language for data manipulation. However it is acheivable by hosting your own kSQL cluster.
Additionally, while the app boasts strong security features, there is room for improvement in user management and access control, which could enhance the overall security posture.
Furthermore, while the user interface is generally intuitive, some users may find it occasionally lags, particularly when handling large datasets. While this lag is not a significant issue, it may detract from the overall user experience for some individuals who prefer a more seamless and modern interface.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Data Streaming and Data Governance
