Confluent Platform vs Apache Kafka: Feature Comparison

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 14:36:00 +0000
Enterprise Technology, Kafka, Apache Kafka, Confluent Partner

Apache Kafka is one of the most widely adopted data streaming platforms in the world and is used extensively by Fortune 100 companies. While Kafka originated as an open-source project, it is also heavily used in corporate and regulated environments where operational maturity, security, and disaster recovery are critical.

Confluent Platform builds on top of open-source Apache Kafka and adds a set of enterprise-grade features aimed at simplifying operations, improving security, and supporting complex production use cases. And now, when IBM has announced its $11B acquisition of Confluent, interest in understanding the differences between open-source Kafka and Confluent Platform is likely to increase.

In this article, we will cover key Confluent Platform features that are not available (or not fully available) in open-source Apache Kafka, focusing on aspects that are especially important for production deployments.

Audit logs

In many organizations – especially regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, or government – security departments require detailed audit logs. These logs are essential for compliance, incident investigation, and forensic analysis.

Open-source Apache Kafka does not provide a built-in audit logging mechanism. While it is possible to approximate auditing by enabling broker logs or using custom authorizers, these solutions are usually incomplete, difficult to maintain, and not standardized.

Confluent Platform provides Audit Logs through its security authorizer, enabled via configuration settings. Authorization events (such as access granted or denied) are written directly to a dedicated Kafka topic. Each audit log entry typically includes:

Principal (user or service account)

Operation (READ, WRITE, DESCRIBE, etc.)

Resource (topic, consumer group, cluster, etc.)

Timestamp

Result (allowed or denied)

Client metadata (IP, listener, protocol)

Because audit logs are stored in Kafka itself, they can be easily integrated with SIEM systems, long-term storage, or monitoring tools. This feature is often a hard requirement in regulated environments and is a strong differentiator compared to open-source Kafka.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Open-source Apache Kafka provides Access Control Lists (ACLs) as its primary authorization mechanism. While ACLs are powerful and flexible, they can become difficult to manage in large environments with:

Hundreds of topics

Many teams and applications

Frequent onboarding and offboarding

Confluent Platform introduces Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), which simplifies authorization by grouping permissions into predefined roles. Instead of managing hundreds or thousands of ACL entries, administrators assign roles to users or service accounts.

Examples of predefined roles include:

DeveloperRead

DeveloperWrite

ResourceOwner

SecurityAdmin

ClusterAdmin

RBAC significantly reduces operational complexity and the risk of misconfiguration. It also integrates seamlessly across the Confluent ecosystem, including:

Kafka brokers

Schema Registry

Kafka Connect

ksqlDB

Control Center

This unified security model makes RBAC particularly attractive for large organizations with multiple teams and shared Kafka infrastructure.

Cluster Linking

For multi-cluster and disaster recovery scenarios, open-source Kafka typically relies on MirrorMaker 2. While functional, MirrorMaker 2 operates as a Kafka Connect-based solution and introduces additional operational overhead and latency.

Confluent Platform offers Cluster Linking, a replication mechanism built directly into the broker layer. Because it operates at the byte level and does not rely on Kafka...