Compare Apache Kafka vs. Azure IoT Hub vs. EMQX

Apache Kafka® is a robust, open-source platform designed for distributed streaming. It can scale production environments to accommodate up to a thousand brokers, handling trillions of messages daily and managing petabytes of data with hundreds of thousands of partitions. The system allows for elastic growth and reduction of both storage and processing capabilities. Furthermore, it enables efficient cluster expansion across availability zones or facilitates the interconnection of distinct clusters across various geographic locations. Users can process event streams through features such as joins, aggregations, filters, transformations, and more, all while utilizing event-time and exactly-once processing guarantees. Kafka's built-in Connect interface seamlessly integrates with a wide range of event sources and sinks, including Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, AWS S3, among others. Additionally, developers can read, write, and manipulate event streams using a diverse selection of programming languages, enhancing the platform's versatility and accessibility. This extensive support for various integrations and programming environments makes Kafka a powerful tool for modern data architectures.

A managed service facilitates two-way communication between IoT devices and Azure, ensuring secure and dependable interaction between your IoT application and its managed devices. With Azure IoT Hub, you have access to a cloud-based backend that can connect almost any device seamlessly. Moreover, you can enhance your solution from the cloud to edge devices through features like per-device authentication, integrated device management, and scalable provisioning options. By utilizing telemetry data from devices to the cloud, you can gain insights into device status and establish message pathways to other Azure services effortlessly, without the need for coding. For cloud-to-device messages, you can reliably send commands and alerts to your connected devices while monitoring message delivery via acknowledgment receipts. The system also allows for automatic resending of messages to address any connectivity issues that may arise. Azure IoT Central goes beyond just proof of concept; it empowers you to create top-tier solutions using a comprehensive hosted IoT application platform, thus fostering innovation in your projects. This combination of features positions Azure as a leading choice for IoT communication solutions.

EMQX is the world's most scalable and reliable MQTT messaging platform designed by EMQ. It supports 100M concurrent IoT device connections per cluster while maintaining extremely high throughput and sub-millisecond latency. EMQX boasts more than 20,000 global users from over 50 countries, connecting more than 100M IoT devices worldwide, and is trusted by over 300 customers in mission-critical IoT scenarios, including well-known brands like HPE, VMware, Verifone, SAIC Volkswagen, and Ericsson. Our edge-to-cloud IoT data solutions are flexible to meet the demands of various industries towards digital transformation, including connected vehicles, Industrial IoT, oil & gas, carrier, finance, smart energy, and smart cities. EMQX Enterprise: The World’s # 1 Scalable MQTT Messaging Platform -100M concurrent MQTT connections -1M/s messages throughput under 1ms latency -Business-critical reliability, Up to 99.99% SLA -Integrate IoT data seamlessly with over 40 cloud services and enterprise systems EMQX Cloud: Fully Managed MQTT Service for IoT - Scale as you need, pay as you go - Flexible and rich IoT data integration up to 40+ choices - Run in 19 regions across AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure - 100% MQTT