23.2 23.1 22.3 22.2 22.1 21.11

Kafka Compatibility

Redpanda is compatible with Apache Kafka version 0.11 through 3.1. Exceptions are described below.

Kafka client compatibility

Clients developed for Kafka versions 0.11 or later work with Redpanda. Modern clients auto-negotiate protocol versions or use an earlier protocol version accepted by Redpanda brokers.

The following clients have been validated with Redpanda.

Language Client

Java

Apache Kafka Java Client

C/C++

librdkafka

Go

franz-go

Python

kafka-python

Node.js

KafkaJS

Rust

kafka-rust

  • Use the latest supported version.

  • Other clients, particularly ones based on librdkafka, work with Redpanda, but they have not been validated.

Unsupported Kafka features

Redpanda does not support the following Apache Kafka capabilities:

  • Explicit partition assignments and altering partition assignments (with Kafka API)

  • Managing SASL users with Kafka APIs: DescribeUserSCRAMCredentialsRequest and AlterUserSCRAMCredentialsRequest APIs

  • HTTP Proxy (pandaproxy): Unlike other REST proxy implementations in the Kafka ecosystem, Redpanda HTTP Proxy does not support topic and ACLs CRUD through the HTTP Proxy. HTTP Proxy is designed for clients producing and consuming data that do not perform administrative functions.

  • Client quotas for bandwidth and request rate

  • Follower fetching

  • Record deletion

If you have any issues while working with a Kafka tool, you can file an issue.