Redpanda Cloud - The proven Apache Kafka alternative (Pay as You Go)

What do you like best about the product?

As a leading company in the internet gaming industry operating at a massive scale, we migrated our Kafka infrastructure from a major, well-known provider to RedPanda two years ago.

What we like best can be broken down into three key areas:

Pricing and Flexibility: The two primary drivers behind our migration were a more competitive pricing model and superior setup flexibility. The Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model perfectly fits our needs—we retain control and pay for nodes and support, while they seamlessly maintain the software.

Flawless Onboarding: The initial setup and the entire migration process from our previous vendor went smoothly.

Exceptional Support: Throughout our 2-year partnership, their support team has been highly responsive and deeply committed. When operating at our scale, issues are inevitable, but RedPanda treats our challenges with the utmost seriousness and works shoulder-to-shoulder with our engineers to resolve them.

What do you dislike about the product?

Operating at our scale means technical challenges are inevitable. Recently, our main concern has been the quality of regular, scheduled migrations, which impacted our system's performance.

However, how Redpanda handled this downside reflects the strength of our partnership. They took our feedback very seriously—freezing the production cluster, investigating the root cause, and working shoulder-to-shoulder with our engineers. They successfully fixed the issues on the broker side and provided useful optimization suggestions for our consumer applications.

While the stability and impact of scheduled migrations at high scale is an area that requires continuous refinement, their proactive, transparent, and collaborative approach to solving the problem mitigated the issue effectively.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Redpanda helps us solve two main business and engineering challenges:

Cost and Infrastructure Optimization: By migrating to Redpanda's Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model, we reduced our streaming infrastructure costs. The main benefit is the commercial efficiency—we only pay for nodes and support, allowing us to manage budgets much more effectively.

Operational Overhead at Scale: As a leading company in the internet gaming industry, managing streaming data at our scale is highly complex. Redpanda solves this by handling the maintenance of their software while allowing us to retain control over our infrastructure. This flexibility, combined with their highly responsive and collaborative support team, ensures that complex technical challenges are resolved quickly without draining our internal engineering resources.

What do you like best about the product?

My favorite part of Redpanda streaming is the user experience and support. It is easy to deploy and monitor. The support from the team and the turnaround time for incidents/issues have been exceptional.

What do you dislike about the product?

Lack of integrations as compared to OS Kafka

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Redpanda allows us to stream events from our Saas product in realtime to provide monitoring and observability both internally and to our customers

What do you like best about the product?

Pricing is very competitive, and the performance compared to other streaming technologies is at a very good level. The UI is intuitive and easy to navigate. Support is very fast and, most of the time, provides a clear way to find a solution.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out why something doesn’t work. Configuration errors should be clearly visible in the GUI. In our case, a single missing curly bracket meant Redpanda Connect wasn’t consuming from topics, but there was no error message that helped us identify the issue quickly. This suggestion doesn’t apply only to this specific area—errors and misconfigurations in general should be much more visible for customers.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Redpanda helped us adopt an event-driven approach in our microservices architecture.

What do you like best about the product?

The UI is better than other solutions I have worked with. The support team helps a lot in reducing integration and maintainance pain

What do you dislike about the product?

We had some events that cuased performance degradation compared to other solutions we used before in which that was never an issue.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It handles all the async communication (messages) of all our micro-services (we are talking about 100s of thousands of messages per second).

What do you like best about the product?

Redpanda is a single binary. Much easier to install, update, and manage a cluster compared to kafka. Performance is good. The console is full featured and easy to navigate.

What do you dislike about the product?

The product maturity seems to be lacking. Many enterprise level features are still very new and unproven. Bugs are introduced in new versions. Many features appear to work well in predictable cloud environments, but not in self-hosted deployments.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Redpanda is a drop-in replacement for kafka, at a reduced price.

What do you like best about the product?

I operate self-hosted environments of Redpanda and appreciate the it consists of a single binary and a single configuration file, rpk is a very versatile tool and I don't need to resort to CURL commands or scripts, it's all inside rpk.

Receiving support is quick and they are always very proactive, helpful and customer success minded.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some error messages could be more descriptive.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We evaluated several providers and went with Redpanda because was the only one that could handle the number of open connections we needed.

We haven't had any performance issues so far and we are even considering about solving other problems using Redpanda, such as ingesting our data into Iceberg tables directly from Redpanda.

What do you like best about the product?

The speed is much higher than Apache Kafka. The simplicity of deployment plus its stability makes it a real winner. Being Kafka compliant also allows us access to wide range of existing tooling.

The quality of the support staff also makes dealing with Redpanda a joy.

What do you dislike about the product?

I wish they had long term support releases that would be supported for three years or more. The release cycle is quite rapid.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We need to move messages/events between systems with multiple consumers and producers. Redpanda does this exceptionally well. Much faster than Apache Kafka while also giving us access to the Kafka ecosystem of tooling.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about Redpanda Streaming is its operational simplicity combined with strong performance. It provides Kafka API compatibility while avoiding the complexity of managing ZooKeeper and reducing overall infrastructure overhead. The platform delivers predictable low-latency performance, scales well, and offers a straightforward developer experience. I also appreciate that it enables us to standardize on a single streaming platform for a wide range of use cases, from event-driven architectures to data integration, while maintaining full control over deployment and upgrades.

What do you dislike about the product?

What I dislike about Redpanda Streaming is that, while the core platform is mature and reliable, the surrounding ecosystem is not as extensive as Apache Kafka's. Some integrations, community resources, and third-party tooling are less common, which can occasionally require additional effort during implementation or troubleshooting. There are also areas where operational visibility and management capabilities could be further improved, particularly for large-scale enterprise deployments. Overall, these are relatively minor concerns compared to the benefits the platform provides.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Redpanda Streaming provides a reliable, scalable event-streaming platform that allows us to decouple systems and build event-driven architectures. It helps us standardize messaging across multiple applications while supporting high-throughput, low-latency workloads. The Kafka API compatibility enables easy integration with existing tools and frameworks, while the simplified operations reduce the effort required to deploy, maintain, and upgrade the platform. This results in faster delivery of new services, lower operational overhead, and a more consistent approach to real-time data distribution across the organization.

What do you like best about the product?

Redpanda Streaming offers quick support, a nice UI, and much cheaper and simple solutions.

What do you dislike about the product?

Latency that affects users in production. Every company has this but the longer a company is there the better they are at mitigating these risks.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Expensive storage.

What do you like best about the product?

Open source and straight to the point, with excellent performance for very common use cases.

Their integrations and massive component library is basically batteries-included for everything that you need. Pricing is decent, but the support has it comes with has been excellent.

What do you dislike about the product?

Bloblang is incredibly powerful and flexible, but performance is unideal. Then again, I haven't compared it to any other alternatives.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our logistics company generates millions of events every day (scans, manifests, telemetry). Streaming them reliably to our various platforms is a critical part of our infrastructure.