Comment by SkipperCat

I've been using Redpanda for a few years now and here's what I've noticed.

Its a compiled binary - no JVM to manage. Java apps have always been a headache for me. Plus, no zookeeper - one less thing to break.

The biggest benefit I've seen is the performance. Redpanda just outperforms Apache Kakfa on similar hardware. Its also Kafka compliant in every way I've noticed, so all my favorite tools that interact with Kafka work the same with Redpanda.

Redpanda, like Kafka, writes to disk, so you'll always be limited by your hardware no matter what you use (but NVMe's are fast and affordable).

YMMV, but its been a good experience for me.