Kafka Compatibility

Redpanda is compatible with Apache Kafka version 0.11 through 3.1. Exceptions are described on this page.

Kafka client compatibility

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

Redpanda Data recommends always using the latest supported version of a client.

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

Language

Client

Java

Apache Kafka Java Client

C/C++

Python

Node.js

Rust

Clients that have not been validated by Redpanda Data are still compatible, particularly those based on librdkafka.

If you find a client that is not supported, reach out to the Redpanda team in the community Slack.

Unsupported Kafka features

Redpanda does not currently support the following Apache Kafka features:

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.
Quotas per user for bandwidth and API request rates (though quotas per client and per client group (per CPU core) are supported).
Follower fetching.
Record deletion.