We handle high volumes of telemetry data and operate under stringent latency requirements, with our data pipeline demanding sub-second response times. Redpanda seamlessly integrates into our data plane, particularly as a message broker system, where performance is absolutely critical. Its low-latency capabilities and robust performance have been essential to meeting our operational demands
External reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Rapid data handling with increased peace of mind and significant cost savings
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
The cost savings have been significant. We were able to eliminate one MSK cluster, and still, the end-to-end lag hasn't been worse. The performance is superb, and the value we are getting for the money we pay is great. Additionally, peace of mind is also a significant benefit due to the high performance and fault tolerance.
What is most valuable?
The whole system itself is valuable. The cost and performance are the primary benefits. Redpanda is extremely fast, which I describe as Kafka on steroids.
What needs improvement?
When it comes to self-hosting, their documentation could be improved. At the time we were onboarded, we had to apply our logic. Updating the documentation and managing the automation file for customer users to self-host would be beneficial.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Redpanda for two years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Redpanda has been highly stable for our workloads. It utilizes the RAFT consensus algorithm, which ensures reliability by maintaining a quorum for data consistency and fault tolerance in cluster formation.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability of Redpanda as very high, around nine out of ten. They support a feature called tiered storage to offload data to keep the systems running efficiently, which provides us with ample capacity.
How are customer service and support?
They are really helpful. During our onboarding, they were very resourceful and knew what they were doing.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used AWS MSK. We switched because MSK was very costly.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of Redpanda was straightforward and rated an eight out of ten. The setup involved using an Ansible script to bootstrap the cluster, which took about 10-15 minutes per cluster.
What about the implementation team?
The deployment was handled internally by one person with assistance from the provided Ansible script.
What was our ROI?
Apart from cost savings, the high performance and low latency provide peace of mind and operational efficiency.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Redpanda is very cost-effective and offers competitive pricing compared to other options in the market. While not the lowest, the pricing is reasonable considering the high performance and value it delivers.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We considered Confluent Cloud, but after reviewing our needs, Redpanda seemed like the perfect fit due to its superior performance and cost benefits. Given that, we decided to move forward without a formal evaluation of other options.
What other advice do I have?
I would advise users to consider their in-house technical expertise when deciding the deployment model for Redpanda. If there is a lack of expertise, it is better to opt for the managed service offered by Redpanda.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
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.
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?
NO
What was our ROI?
Yes.
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
Scalability, Usability, Stability - Pick all
Quality software delivered by a quality team
Kafka as it Should be
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.
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.
Amazing Product and ever more amazing people!
- > 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.
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!
Best Kafka solution in the market
Rock Solid Technology with World Class Support
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.