StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Background Jobs
  4. Message Queue
  5. Datomic vs Kafka

Datomic vs Kafka

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Kafka
Kafka
Stacks24.2K
Followers22.3K
Votes607
GitHub Stars31.2K
Forks14.8K
Datomic
Datomic
Stacks62
Followers75
Votes0

Datomic vs Kafka: What are the differences?

What is Datomic? The fully transactional, cloud-ready, distributed database. Build flexible, distributed systems that can leverage the entire history of your critical data, not just the most current state. Build them on your existing infrastructure or jump straight to the cloud.

What is Kafka? Distributed, fault tolerant, high throughput pub-sub messaging system. Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

Datomic can be classified as a tool in the "Databases" category, while Kafka is grouped under "Message Queue".

Kafka is an open source tool with 12.7K GitHub stars and 6.81K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Kafka's open source repository on GitHub.

Uber Technologies, Spotify, and Slack are some of the popular companies that use Kafka, whereas Datomic is used by Rareburg, Exicon, and Yieldbot. Kafka has a broader approval, being mentioned in 509 company stacks & 470 developers stacks; compared to Datomic, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Kafka, Datomic

viradiya
viradiya

Apr 12, 2020

Needs adviceonAngularJSAngularJSASP.NET CoreASP.NET CoreMSSQLMSSQL

We are going to develop a microservices-based application. It consists of AngularJS, ASP.NET Core, and MSSQL.

We have 3 types of microservices. Emailservice, Filemanagementservice, Filevalidationservice

I am a beginner in microservices. But I have read about RabbitMQ, but come to know that there are Redis and Kafka also in the market. So, I want to know which is best.

933k views933k
Comments
Ishfaq
Ishfaq

Feb 28, 2020

Needs advice

Our backend application is sending some external messages to a third party application at the end of each backend (CRUD) API call (from UI) and these external messages take too much extra time (message building, processing, then sent to the third party and log success/failure), UI application has no concern to these extra third party messages.

So currently we are sending these third party messages by creating a new child thread at end of each REST API call so UI application doesn't wait for these extra third party API calls.

I want to integrate Apache Kafka for these extra third party API calls, so I can also retry on failover third party API calls in a queue(currently third party messages are sending from multiple threads at the same time which uses too much processing and resources) and logging, etc.

Question 1: Is this a use case of a message broker?

Question 2: If it is then Kafka vs RabitMQ which is the better?

804k views804k
Comments
Roman
Roman

Senior Back-End Developer, Software Architect

Feb 12, 2019

ReviewonKafkaKafka

I use Kafka because it has almost infinite scaleability in terms of processing events (could be scaled to process hundreds of thousands of events), great monitoring (all sorts of metrics are exposed via JMX).

Downsides of using Kafka are:

  • you have to deal with Zookeeper
  • you have to implement advanced routing yourself (compared to RabbitMQ it has no advanced routing)
10.8k views10.8k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kafka
Kafka
Datomic
Datomic

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

Build flexible, distributed systems that can leverage the entire history of your critical data, not just the most current state. Build them on your existing infrastructure or jump straight to the cloud.

Written at LinkedIn in Scala;Used by LinkedIn to offload processing of all page and other views;Defaults to using persistence, uses OS disk cache for hot data (has higher throughput then any of the above having persistence enabled);Supports both on-line as off-line processing
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
31.2K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
14.8K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
24.2K
Stacks
62
Followers
22.3K
Followers
75
Votes
607
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 126
    High-throughput
  • 119
    Distributed
  • 92
    Scalable
  • 86
    High-Performance
  • 66
    Durable
Cons
  • 32
    Non-Java clients are second-class citizens
  • 29
    Needs Zookeeper
  • 9
    Operational difficulties
  • 5
    Terrible Packaging
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Kafka, Datomic?

MongoDB

MongoDB

MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.

MySQL

MySQL

The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft® SQL Server is a database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions.

SQLite

SQLite

SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.

Cassandra

Cassandra

Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

Memcached

Memcached

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

MariaDB

MariaDB

Started by core members of the original MySQL team, MariaDB actively works with outside developers to deliver the most featureful, stable, and sanely licensed open SQL server in the industry. MariaDB is designed as a drop-in replacement of MySQL(R) with more features, new storage engines, fewer bugs, and better performance.

RethinkDB

RethinkDB

RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase