Feature Comparison
Liftbridge shares some similarities with other stream-oriented pub/sub messaging systems. The below feature-comparison matrix shows how it compares to a few of these systems.
Architect's Note
These are highly nuanced pieces of infrastructure, so a straight comparison of features is often of minimal value when evaluating solutions. This matrix is primarily meant to serve as a reference point for those attempting to develop a mental model of Liftbridge.
| Liftbridge | NATS Streaming | Apache Kafka | Apache Pulsar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runtime | self-contained binary | self-contained binary | JVM | JVM |
| At-least-once delivery | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transactions | ✓ | |||
| Partitioning | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Linear Horizontal Scalability | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Clustering/Replication | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| External Coordination | Apache ZooKeeper | Apache ZooKeeper | ||
| Message Replay | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Message Queueing | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Wildcard Topic Matching | ✓ | |||
| Topic Pausing | ✓ | |||
| Rate Limiting | opt-in rate matching | quotas | publish rate limiting | |
| Log Retention | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Log Compaction | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Message Headers | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Multiple Consumers | consumer groups | queue subscriptions | consumer groups | subscriptions |
| Consumer Position Tracking | consumer groups & cursors | durable subscriptions | consumer groups | cursors |
| Event-enabled | activity stream | |||
| Multitenancy | namespaced clusters | namespaced clusters | topic-level ACLs | multitenant shared cluster |
| Authentication | TLS | User authentication, TLS | TLS, Kerberos, SASL | TLS, Kerberos, JWT, Athenz |
| Authorization | ACLs | ACLs | ||
| Storage | filesystem | memory, filesystem, SQL | filesystem | filesystem (Apache BookKeeper), tiered storage (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage) |
| Encryption of data-at-rest | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |