Every category where a model named Apache Kafka for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Streaming platforms	Data platform	17%	3 of 78	29%	51	criticized challenger
ETL and ELT	Data platform	0%	49 of 66	50%	2	under 10 labels · led by Airbyte at 32%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Apache Kafka yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Apache Kafka across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	1	0	1	1	3
GPT-5.4 mini	2	1	1	1	5
Gemini 3.5 Flash	1	0	0	3	4
Perplexity Sonar	2	0	1	1	4
Grok 4.1 Fast	3	1	0	1	5
Mistral Small	2	0	1	1	4
DeepSeek V4 Flash	2	1	0	2	5
Llama 4 Maverick	0	2	1	1	4
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	1	1	2	5
Kimi K2	3	0	1	2	6
GLM 4.7 FlashX	2	0	1	1	4
MiniMax M2.5	2	0	2	0	4

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct20 labels3

Paraphrase2 labelsNone

Comparative30 labels19not counted in share

Budget-constrained29 labels15

Scale-constrained27 labels1

Negative31 labels5not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative139 labels in all, every segment counted; 19 of the 43 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“Kafka is the dominant default — it's been in production at massive scale for over a decade, has the largest ecosystem of connectors and tools” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Streaming · comparative prompt · first choice

“Apache Kafka - Open-source and free... highly scalable and widely used, making it ideal if you have technical expertise in-house.” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Streaming · budget prompt · first choice

“Choose Confluent / Kafka if you are an enterprise building a broad, mission-critical real-time data architecture” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Streaming · comparative prompt · first choice

“Apache Kafka (Best Free Option) - Cost: Completely free (open-source) ... Industry standard, highly scalable” Kimi K2 · Streaming · budget prompt · first choice

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Deprecated, being removed ... Kafka 4.0 (2025) removed ZooKeeper entirely.” Kimi K2 · Streaming · negative prompt · hard negative

“Kafka lacks built-in ETL capabilities like data transformation and loading... making it less suitable for simple ETL pipelines” Claude Haiku 4.5 · ETL · negative prompt · soft negative

“While it's a popular and widely-used platform, it may not be suitable for small static websites or low-traffic applications.” Llama 4 Maverick · Streaming · negative prompt · soft negative

“misconfigurations around idempotence, in-flight requests, and acknowledgments can cause ordering or delivery issues” GPT-5.4 mini · Streaming · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Apache Kafka, over the 138 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Apache Kafka was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Redpanda101 of 13826Compare →

Confluent Cloud95 of 13825Compare →

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams93 of 1385Not in the top three

Apache Pulsar81 of 1381Not in the top three

Google Cloud Pub/Sub70 of 1383Not in the top three

Azure Event Hubs60 of 1382Not in the top three

Amazon MSK49 of 1384Not in the top three

RabbitMQ31 of 1381Not in the top three

Aiven for Apache Kafka29 of 1385Not in the top three

NATS JetStream18 of 1380Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Apache Kafka. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 109 of the 138 answers that named Apache Kafka and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

guideflow.com66

devopsschool.com52

automq.com45

confluent.io45

cotocus.com39

gartner.com37

redpanda.com32

gravitee.io27

risingwave.com25

bestdevops.com23

391 of the 391 domain citations in answers naming Apache Kafka came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

guideflow.com/blog/event-streaming-software65

devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-features-pros-cons-comparison44

cotocus.com/blog/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-features-pros-cons-comparison37

gartner.com/reviews/market/event-stream-processing36

automq.com/blog/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-confluent-msk-redpanda-alternatives33

gravitee.io/blog/best-event-streaming-solutions25

bestdevops.com/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-tools-in-2025-features-pros-cons-compariso22

devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-tools-in-2025-features-pros-cons-co19

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Apache Kafka

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Apache Kafka; a claim can dispute any of them.

Kafka 10Self-Managed Apache Kafka 2Self-hosted Apache Kafka 2Apache Kafka & Confluent (IBM) 1Apache Kafka (Self-Managed) 1Apache Kafka (especially KRaft mode) 1Apache Kafka (self-managed) 1Apache Kafka with ZooKeeper 1self-hosted Apache Kafka 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Apache Kafka's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Apache Kafka, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at apache.org is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.