{"slug": "redpanda", "name": "Redpanda", "category": "terminal", "category_name": "Terminal and shell", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 7, "warners": 0, "score": 3.923, "rising": -1.31, "first": "2025-12-04", "latest": "2026-04-09", "why": "Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 2, "compare": 1, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years.", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "redpanda.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.redpanda.com/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Redpanda", "redpanda"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 739254673, "item_id": 46203417, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203417", "by": "jsumrall", "date": "2025-12-09", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Redpanda seems like a great re-implementation of Kafka.", "excerpt": "Seems like a great day for Pulsar / StreamNative and Redpanda who are going to get a lot of new customers in the coming years. When looking for alternatives to Kafka these are the most promising options I found, not counting RabbitMQ which needs no introduction. Pulsar seems to be 'kafka done better'. The version of Kafka that Confluent used internally (Kora) seems closer to Pular as well. Pulsar has a lot of feature", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "IBM to acquire Confluent"}, {"id": 739095648, "item_id": 46193478, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193478", "by": "tapoxi", "date": "2025-12-08", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise.", "excerpt": "We switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed service. I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, bu", "context": "", "use_case": "Kafka-compatible streaming (BYOC)", "switched_from": "Confluent", "story": "IBM to acquire Confluent"}, {"id": 739089808, "item_id": 46193113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193113", "by": "adamdecaf", "date": "2025-12-08", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years.", "excerpt": "Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years. https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka", "context": "", "use_case": "Kafka alternative", "switched_from": "", "story": "IBM to acquire Confluent"}, {"id": 739085392, "item_id": 46192837, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192837", "by": "b33f", "date": "2025-12-08", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Maybe a good time to consider alternatives", "excerpt": "Maybe a good time to consider alternatives https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "IBM to acquire Confluent"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "jon_north", "context": "Contract backend engineer seeking work", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49525256", "date": "2026-09-01"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["streaming data architecture", "streaming data platform", "kafka-compatible streaming (byoc)", "kafka alternative"], "compared": [{"slug": "apache-kafka", "name": "Apache Kafka", "co": 14, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "terraform", "name": "Terraform", "co": 7, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "aws-lambda", "name": "AWS Lambda", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "microsoft-azure", "name": "Microsoft Azure", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 783281488, "item_id": 48955093, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955093", "by": "fragmede", "date": "2026-07-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "stop using cat, use something modern. I recommend redpanda, rp, but I'm biased since I'm the author.", "excerpt": "First off, stop using cat, use something modern. I recommend redpanda, rp, but I'm biased since I'm the author. Anyway, the reason I use useless cat is because when I'm working with large files, it starts with head, not cat, or tail, and then only after I've built the pipeline do I use cat to process the whole file.", "context": "author of the tool", "use_case": "replacement for cat", "switched_from": "", "story": "PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats"}, {"id": 780064048, "item_id": 48754003, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48754003", "by": "jon_north", "date": "2026-07-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using Redpanda/Kafka on Azure+Terraform", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK - Contract, Remote, USA, backend engineer I am a backend expert, having built and maintained mission critical, low latency and highly available systems for many companies over the last 10 years, in addition to over 20 total years of software development experience. I learn new things extremely quickly. AWS preferred but not required (I hold a variety of certs, available here: https://www.credly.com/users", "context": "", "use_case": "Streaming data architecture", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2026)"}, {"id": 762606048, "item_id": 47662878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662878", "by": "rp_talent", "date": "2026-04-06", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Redpanda is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP)", "excerpt": "Redpanda Data | REMOTE | Full-time | https://www.redpanda.com/careers Redpanda is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP) - a new category in AI infrastructure that makes it simple and secure to connect AI agents with enterprise data and systems. Built on a multi-modal data streaming engine, Redpanda empowers agentic applications that reason and act in real-time with speed, autonomy, and precision. Global leaders inc", "context": "", "use_case": "Streaming data platform", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2026)"}, {"id": 758486448, "item_id": 47405403, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47405403", "by": "PeterCorless", "date": "2026-03-16", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I work for Redpanda and I helped write this.", "excerpt": "This is the related benchmark blog from Redpanda [disclosure: I work for Redpanda and I helped write this. Credit to Travis Downs & others at Redpanda for the heavy lifting on the testing and analysis.] https://www.redpanda.com/blog/nvidia-vera-cpu-performance-benchmark", "context": "Works at Redpanda", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI"}, {"id": 753909456, "item_id": 47119341, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119341", "by": "fragmede", "date": "2026-02-22", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My clone of cat(1) is called redpanda(no manual)", "excerpt": "My clone of cat(1) is called redpanda(no manual) that includes kitty terminal graphics protocol support so I can cat nyan.png and get nyancat rendered in the terminal I'm using (ghostty) instead of cat spewing a bunch of garbage. https://github.com/fragmede/redpanda", "context": "", "use_case": "cat clone with terminal graphics", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Have you ever cloned a cat?"}, {"id": 743514000, "item_id": 46469625, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469625", "by": "rp_talent", "date": "2026-01-02", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Redpanda is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP)", "excerpt": "Redpanda Data | REMOTE | Full-time | https://www.redpanda.com/careers Redpanda is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP) - a new category in AI infrastructure that makes it simple and secure to connect AI agents with enterprise data and systems. Built on a multi-modal data streaming engine, Redpanda empowers agentic applications that reason and act in real-time with speed, autonomy, and precision. Global leaders inc", "context": "", "use_case": "data streaming engine", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192130", "title": "IBM to acquire Confluent", "mentions": 7}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922572", "title": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2026)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49522905", "title": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2026)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48953719", "title": "PSA about abuse of cat(1) command. Don't abuse cats", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48749020", "title": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2026)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357724", "title": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 4, "neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "quotes": [{"id": 798772816, "item_id": 49923301, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923301", "by": "jon_north", "date": "2026-10-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using Redpanda/Kafka on Azure+Terraform", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK - Contract, Remote, USA, backend engineer I am a backend expert, having built and maintained mission critical, low latency and highly available systems for many companies over the last 10 years, in addition to over 20 total years of software development experience. I learn new things extremely quickly. AWS preferred but not required (I hold a variety of certs, available here: https://www.credly.com/users", "context": "", "use_case": "Streaming data architecture", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2026)"}, {"id": 792404096, "item_id": 49525256, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49525256", "by": "jon_north", "date": "2026-09-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using Redpanda/Kafka on Azure+Terraform", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK - Contract, Remote, USA, backend engineer I am a backend expert, having built and maintained mission critical, low latency and highly available systems for many companies over the last 10 years, in addition to over 20 total years of software development experience. I learn new things extremely quickly. AWS preferred but not required (I hold a variety of certs, available here: https://www.credly.com/users", "context": "Contract backend engineer seeking work", "use_case": "Streaming data platform", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2026)"}, {"id": 773731907, "item_id": 48358244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48358244", "by": "jon_north", "date": "2026-06-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Kafka, Redpanda, PySpark", "excerpt": "Location: USA Remote: Preferred Willing to relocate: Maybe Expert backend developer primarily focused on data engineering, mission critical/low latency/highly available systems, and AWS (certs: https://www.credly.com/users/jon-north.ad78f0c8). Happy to deal with greenfield or legacy or any mix of the two. I learn new things extremely quickly. I prefer long term contract work, though I\u2019ll help you with smaller things ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 767689680, "item_id": 47980605, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980605", "by": "jon_north", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Redpanda/Kafka on Azure+Terraform", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK - Contract, Remote, USA, backend engineer I am a backend expert, having built and maintained mission critical, low latency and highly available systems for many companies over the last 10 years, in addition to over 20 total years of software development experience. I learn new things extremely quickly. AWS preferred but not required (I hold a variety of certs, available here: https://www.credly.com/users", "context": "", "use_case": "streaming data architecture", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2026)"}, {"id": 763379249, "item_id": 47711203, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711203", "by": "fsaintjacques", "date": "2026-04-09", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "you can use it in redpanda WASM streams", "excerpt": "I recently toyed with a tiny VM for protobuf, you can use it in redpanda WASM streams, or in streaming pipeline (without having to use SAX parsers or IDL shenanigans with projected message compiled...) for filtering and projecting before deserializing. 100% written by claude. https://github.com/fsaintjacques/wql", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Progressive encoding and decoding of 'repeated' protobuffer fields"}, {"id": 761701938, "item_id": 47606371, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47606371", "by": "jon_north", "date": "2026-04-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using Redpanda/Kafka on Azure+Terraform", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK - Contract, Remote, USA, backend engineer I am a backend expert, having built and maintained mission critical, low latency and highly available systems for many companies over the last 10 years, in addition to over 20 total years of software development experience. I learn new things extremely quickly. AWS preferred but not required (I hold a variety of certs, available here: https://www.credly.com/users", "context": "Backend engineer seeking contract work", "use_case": "streaming data architecture", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2026)"}, {"id": 755525968, "item_id": 47220373, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220373", "by": "jon_north", "date": "2026-03-02", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using Redpanda/Kafka", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK - Contract, Remote, USA, backend engineer I am a backend expert, having built and maintained mission critical, low latency and highly available systems for many companies over the last 10 years, in addition to over 20 total years of software development experience. I learn new things extremely quickly. AWS preferred but not required (I hold a variety of certs, available here: https://www.credly.com/users", "context": "backend engineer seeking contract work", "use_case": "Streaming data architecture", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March 2026)"}, {"id": 749748864, "item_id": 46859304, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859304", "by": "jon_north", "date": "2026-02-02", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using Redpanda/Kafka on Azure+Terraform", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK - Contract, Remote, USA, backend engineer I am a backend expert, having built and maintained mission critical, low latency and highly available systems for many companies over the last 10 years, in addition to over 20 total years of software development experience. I learn new things extremely quickly. AWS preferred but not required (I hold a variety of certs, available here: https://www.credly.com/users", "context": "freelance backend engineer", "use_case": "streaming data architecture", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2026)"}, {"id": 743531552, "item_id": 46470722, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46470722", "by": "jon_north", "date": "2026-01-02", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using Redpanda/Kafka on Azure+Terraform", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK - Contract, Remote, USA, backend engineer I am a backend expert, having built and maintained mission critical, low latency and highly available systems for many companies over the last 10 years, in addition to over 20 total years of software development experience. AWS preferred but not required (I hold a variety of certs, available here: https://www.credly.com/users/jon-north.ad78f0c8) You will like wor", "context": "backend engineer seeking contract work", "use_case": "streaming data architecture", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2026)"}, {"id": 739254673, "item_id": 46203417, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203417", "by": "jsumrall", "date": "2025-12-09", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Redpanda seems like a great re-implementation of Kafka.", "excerpt": "Seems like a great day for Pulsar / StreamNative and Redpanda who are going to get a lot of new customers in the coming years. When looking for alternatives to Kafka these are the most promising options I found, not counting RabbitMQ which needs no introduction. Pulsar seems to be 'kafka done better'. The version of Kafka that Confluent used internally (Kora) seems closer to Pular as well. Pulsar has a lot of feature", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "IBM to acquire Confluent"}, {"id": 739157264, "item_id": 46197329, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197329", "by": "rockwotj", "date": "2025-12-08", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Redpanda is https://jepsen.io/analyses/redpanda-21.10.1", "excerpt": "Redpanda is https://jepsen.io/analyses/redpanda-21.10.1", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 739095648, "item_id": 46193478, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193478", "by": "tapoxi", "date": "2025-12-08", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise.", "excerpt": "We switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed service. I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, bu", "context": "", "use_case": "Kafka-compatible streaming (BYOC)", "switched_from": "Confluent", "story": "IBM to acquire Confluent"}, {"id": 739089808, "item_id": 46193113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193113", "by": "adamdecaf", "date": "2025-12-08", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years.", "excerpt": "Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years. https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka", "context": "", "use_case": "Kafka alternative", "switched_from": "", "story": "IBM to acquire Confluent"}, {"id": 739089184, "item_id": 46193074, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193074", "by": "mliezun", "date": "2025-12-08", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Snowflake acquired redpanda earlier this year", "excerpt": "Maybe this whole thing it's because Snowflake acquired redpanda earlier this year: https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-redpanda-acquisition-impact-confluent/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "IBM to acquire Confluent"}, {"id": 739085392, "item_id": 46192837, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192837", "by": "b33f", "date": "2025-12-08", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Maybe a good time to consider alternatives", "excerpt": "Maybe a good time to consider alternatives https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "IBM to acquire Confluent"}, {"id": 738346080, "item_id": 46146630, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146630", "by": "teleforce", "date": "2025-12-04", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "For Kafka alternative written in C++ there's Redpanda [1],[2].", "excerpt": "For Kafka alternative written in C++ there's Redpanda [1],[2]. Redpanda claim of better performance but benchmarks showed no clear winner [3]. It will be interesting to test them together on the performance benchmarks. I've got the feeling it's not due to programming language implementation of Scala/Java (Kafka), C++ (Redpanda) and Rust (Walrus). It's the very architecture of Kafka itself due to the notorious head of", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Walrus \u2013 a Kafka alternative written in Rust"}]}