Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to BlazeMQ – 52KB Kafka-compatible broker in C++20, zero dependencies
I built a message broker that speaks the Kafka wire protocol, so any Kafka client (librdkafka, kafka-python, kcat, etc.) works without code changes. The entire binary is 52KB. No JVM, no ZooKeeper, no third-party libraries — just C++20 with kqueue/epoll. Starts in <10ms, uses 0% CPU when idle. I built this because running Kafka locally for development is painful — gigabytes of RAM, slow startup, ZooKeeper/KRaft configuration. I just wanted something that accepts produce requests and gets out of the way. Technical details: - Single-threaded event loop (kqueue on macOS, epoll on…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1
Kafka 0.8.0 broker implementation on top of Cloudflare Workers - maxwellpeterson/kafka-worker
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Diskless Kafka® on S3. 10x Cost-Effective. No Cross-AZ Traffic Cost. Autoscale in seconds. Single-digit ms latency. Multi-AZ Availability. - AutoMQ/automq
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Contribute to panyam/KafkaLite development by creating an account on GitHub.
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Kafka-based Job Queue for Python. Contribute to joowani/kq development by creating an account on GitHub.
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
This is the source code to Franz, a native desktop client for Apache Kafka I've been working on for the past ~three years or so. Around 2021, I started using Kafka at a startup and I didn't like any of the clients that were available at the time, so I decided to build my own in my spare time[1]. I wanted a solid native experience on the Mac that wasn't web based and didn't require any Docker containers to run. A few months ago, I decided to make the code source-available[2] in part because I like the idea of my users being able to see the code they're running and in part because I want to…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
🦭 Distributed log streaming engine built from first principles - nubskr/walrus
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Redpanda Console is a developer-friendly UI for managing your Kafka/Redpanda workloads. Console gives you a simple, interactive approach for gaining visibility into your topics, masking data, managing consumer groups, and exploring real-time data with time-travel debugging. - redpanda-data/console
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8PD
PicoMQ is a Rust server for Durable Streams, built on Object Store. Cheap, URL-addressable, granular streams (create/append/read/long-poll/SSE), with Pico Protocol or Durable Streams Protocol as the facade. S3Stream is the stream storage primitive, used in AutoMQ, shipped as a Rust library. Coordination is a command log in Postgres.
Aug 2026 · picomq.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Simple configuration and mocking of Kafka clients. Contribute to obsidiandynamics/jackdaw development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Hello Everyone! We built SQLFlow as a lightweight stream processing engine. We leverage DuckDB as the stream processing engine, which gives SQLFlow the ability to process 10's of thousands of messages a second using ~250MiB of memory! DuckDB also supports a rich ecosystem of sinks and connectors! https://sql-flow.com/docs/category/tutorials/ https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow We were tired of running JVM's for simple stream processing, and also of bespoke one off stream processors I would love your feedback, criticisms and/or…
Dec 2025 · sql-flow.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Hi HN! We’re Yann, Edouard, and Bastien from Koyeb (https://www.koyeb.com/). We’re building a platform to let you deploy full-stack apps on high-performance hardware around the world, with zero configuration. We provide a “global serverless feeling”, without the hassle of re-writing all your apps or managing k8s complexity [1]. We built Scaleway, a cloud service provider where we designed ARM servers and provided them as cloud servers. During our time there, we saw customers struggle with the same issues while trying to deploy full-stack applications and APIs resiliently. As…
2023 · koyeb.com · its alternatives →
- 12
In 2023, AWS announced[1] IAM authentication for MSK Kafka clusters with support for "all programming languages"… except C++. While Java[2], Python[3], Go[4], and others got official SDKs, C++ developers/vendors were stuck hardcoding SCRAM-SHA credentials in code/configs or relying on heavier Java-based tools like Kafka Connect or Apache Flink. Later, community projects added Rust[5] and Ruby[6] support. Why no C++? Rust might be the new favorite, but C++ is still king for high-performance data systems: minimal dependencies, lean resource use, and raw speed. At Timeplus, we needed…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
When building Hookie, I worked with NATS Jetstream a lot. While you can do everything using the CLI, I prefer the feeling of a nice GUI better. So I built one.
Aug 2026 · streambench.app · its alternatives →
- 14
AutoMQ is a fully open-source, next-generation Kafka built on top of S3. Version 1.5.0 is a very important release. In March of this year, Confluent officially launched the commercial capability of Tableflow. Now, with the AutoMQ open-source software, you can also experience this killer feature. Simply put, for Kafka streaming data, AutoMQ can automatically store it in S3 in Iceberg Table format, so you no longer need to manage Flink Jobs and Spark Jobs yourself to perform ETL operations and convert Kafka data into table format. We believe this will be the new paradigm for Kafka stream data…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Hi HN. I'm Carl, creator of LavinMQ. LavinMQ is an open-source message broker. AMQP 0-9-1, MQTT, HTTP and streaming. Single binary, minimal resource use. If you know RabbitMQ, it's that (but running on a fraction of hardware). We're the team behind CloudAMQP where we've hosted RabbitMQ for 14 years. Sometimes customers hit issues we couldn't fully explain / work around. So we built our own broker, in order to provide solutions where we previously couldn't (which is much easier when you control the full stack). It all started by me building an open-source AMQP proxy to handle short-lived…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi HN, I built Ayder — a single-binary, HTTP-native durable event log written in C. The wedge is simple: curl is the client (no JVM, no ZooKeeper, no thick client libs). There’s a 2-minute demo that starts with an unclean SIGKILL, then restarts and verifies offsets + data are still there. Numbers (3-node Raft, real network, sync-majority writes, 64B payload): ~50K msg/s sustained (wrk2 @ 50K req/s), client P99 ~3.46ms. Crash recovery after SIGKILL is ~40–50s with ~8M offsets. Repo link has the video, benchmarks, and quick start. I’m looking for a few early design partners (any…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
🦎 A lightweight, multi-protocol gateway for event-driven applications and AI agents. Expose and govern Kafka, MQTT, APIs, and MCP through one high-performance engine with shared routing, security, schema, and observability. - aklivity/zilla
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
I built a Model Context Protocol server that allows users to interact with Kafka using natural language instead of complex CLIs. It uses LLMs to interpret commands in plain English and executes the corresponding Kafka operations. This makes Kafka more accessible to non-experts while maintaining its powerful functionality.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
The lightest-weight k8s dev environments in the world.
2024 · kardinal.dev · its alternatives →
- 20
a command-line Protobuf parser with Kafka support and JSON output - sevagh/pq
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
[Deprecated] Load data from Kafka to any data warehouse. BQ sink is being supported in Firehose now. https://github.com/odpf/firehose - gojekfarm/beast
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Fully managed production grade Kubernetes based platform
2021 · its alternatives →
- 23
AutoMQ Kafka▲13Serverless Kafka solution that is more scalable and cheaper
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24CK
FastStream - https://github.com/airtai/faststream, a stream processing framework, already supports Kafka stream processing using the aiokafka library, as well as other brokers such as Redis, RabbitMQ, and NATS. Responding to popular demand, the latest 0.4.0rc0 version introduces support for Kafka stream processing using Confluent Kafka's Python library - https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-python. Please take a look at it and let us know what you think: https://faststream.airt.ai/0.4/confluent/ Wondering why and how…
2024 · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Kafka 0.8.0 on Cloudflare Workers alternatives
- AutoMQ - A Cost-Effective Kafka Distro That Can Autoscale in Seconds alternatives
- KafkaLite – A simple message broker inspired by Kafka alternatives
- KQ – Simple Job Queue for Python Using Kafka alternatives
- Franz – A desktop client for Apache Kafka alternatives
- Walrus – a Kafka alternative written in Rust alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →