Apache Kafka vs. TIBCO Messaging

For brokering messages, Confluent Kafka is well suited since it offers a managed solution ready to use. Scenarios where the solution is not very well suited are for example, where pricing is an issue. The solution costs quite a lot for basic usage (for example: for 3 clusters, pricing is above 100k$ a year).

Incentivized

Organization which uses TIBCO Business Works or TIBCO Business Process Management or TIBCO BPM Enterprise can make use of TIBCO Messaging as it works well with other TIBCO tools. Many TIBCO tools have TIBCO Messaging products bundled as a package along with other TIBCO tools. Use of dynamic topics and queues makes run time processing easier.

Incentivized

• Apache Kafka is able to handle a large number of I/Os (writes) using 3-4 cheap servers.
• It scales very well over large workloads and can handle extreme-scale deployments (eg. Linkedin with 300 billion user events each day).
• The same Kafka setup can be used as a messaging bus, storage system or a log aggregator making it easy to maintain as one system feeding multiple applications.

Incentivized

• Tibco EMS performs very well, and it meets our stringent performance requirements for corporate messaging backbone.
• Tibco EMS scales well, and this is another of our stringent requirements.
• Tibco provides good support for the EMS product, and continues to improve it. This is important as we don't want to use something that does not keep up with the changes in the technology landscape.

Incentivized

• The Kafka Tool is a community-made Java application that looks and feels from the past century.
• Logging can be confusing. This certainly shows when we have to do troubleshooting.
• Hybrid scenarios - pub/sub, but there are services in and outside a Kubernetes cluster. Then there are a ~3 options, but only 2 (the harder ones) are production-safe.

Incentivized

• A bit of lag time between data sync and the data reaching the server for some of our field sites.
• It still seems like a niche product for me with little community support. I didn't know about it before working for a company that deployed it.
• Certain functionality is too complex to setup as compared to other products on the market.

Incentivized

Kafka has suited our use case very well so far. Going forward we are planning to expand our platform manifold so the load on Kafka and our reliance on Kafka is going to increase only.

EMS is a solid system and I see no reason to abandon it, in fact I am eager to see what the next versions will offer and future road maps. Knowing we have support to help us in case of problems is invaluable, both in case of critical issues and to improve overall performance.

Incentivized

Apache Kafka is highly recommended to develop loosely coupled, real-time processing applications. Also, Apache Kafka provides property based configuration. Producer, Consumer and broker contain their own separate property file

Incentivized

Support for Apache Kafka (if willing to pay) is available from Confluent that includes the same time that created Kafka at Linkedin so they know this software in and out. Moreover, Apache Kafka is well known and best practices documents and deployment scenarios are easily available for download. For example, from eBay, Linkedin, Uber, and NYTimes.

Incentivized

Apache Kafka is built for scale. From high throughput and real-time data streaming, it has a strong advantage over RabbitMQ with its low latency. This put Apache Kafka at the forefront as the platform of choice for large datasets messaging and ensuring scalability when data scale up tremendously. RabbitMQ however has its strengths in traditional messaging. Routing and message delivery reliability are the bedrock of RabbitMQ and this is where RabbitMQ excels. In my previous workplace, RabbitMQ was of choice as reliability matters more than scale. In two words. Apache Kafka for scale, RabbitMQ for reliability. And for cloud deployment and large dataset messaging in what I am doing now, Apache Kafka is the default choice.

We chose TIBCO Messaging not just for its performance but because it looked like the natural way to pave our existing TIBCO Integration architecture. Setting up TIBCO EMS servers and objects seems more straightforward than with most of competitors. It is easy to configure and easy to use and understand.

Incentivized

• Positive: bursts of traffic on special holidays are easy to handle because Kafka can absorb and buffer all the messages we need to process long enough to let an understaffed set of back-end services catch up on processing. Hard to put a number to it but we probably save $5k a month having fewer machines running.
• Positive: makes decoupling the web and API services from the deeper back-end services easier by providing topics as an interface. This allowed us to split up our teams and have them develop independently of each other, speeding up software development.
• Negative: our engineers have made mistakes such as accidentally dropping a few thousand messages due to the CLI being confusing to use, and as a result a customer lost some of their precious data. I'd say that was more our fault than Kafka's though.

Incentivized

• Improved developer productivity as TIBCO Enterprise Message Service requires minimal coding
• Quicker time to market as the configuration / onboarding can be automated with this tool
• Ability to onboard more clients/consumers as the tool can handle large volumes seamless
• Improved visibility on the end to end process as the product provides monitoring by using JMS header information