Contrasting NATS with Apache Kafka

Emil Koutanov
ITNEXT
Published in
6 min readSep 2, 2020

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TL;DR Kafka is an Event Streaming Platform, while NATS is a closer to a conventional Message Queue. Kafka is optimised around the unique needs of emerging Event-Driven Architectures, which enrich the traditional pub-sub model with strong ordering and persistence semantics. Conversely, NATS is highly optimised around pub-sub topologies, and is an excellent platform for decoupling systems where message order and reliable delivery…

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Software architect, an engineer, and a dad. Also an avid storyteller, maintainer of Kafdrop, and author of Effective Kafka.