Other logs people mention next to Camus.
Dated 2026-11-11. Cells are what each project publishes about itself. Performance numbers on those pages are theirs. Camus numbers are only the ones in benchmarks.
| Project | Runtime and license | Kafka wire | Log and acknowledgement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Camus | Rust. Apache-2.0. One binary. | Pinned to Apache Kafka 4.4.0. Transactions use metadata ranges. See production. | Sealed batches in R2 or S3. wal acks a disk majority, then uploads. r2 acks after the object and the metadata commit. |
| Apache Kafka | Java. Apache-2.0. Brokers plus KRaft. | The reference, including transactions. | Replicated local disks. An acknowledgement is a replica quorum. Tiered storage is optional. |
| AutoMQ | Java, a fork of Kafka. Apache-2.0 for the open-source build. One broker process, plus object storage. | Kafka protocol, as a fork of the broker. | Shared object storage. Open source uses an S3 write-ahead log. Their licensing page says that path's produce p99 is above 600 ms, and that commercial WAL options (EBS, FSx) are the sub-10 ms path. |
| Redpanda | C++. Community edition is the Business Source License, which converts to Apache-2.0 four years after a release and forbids offering it as a streaming service. One binary. | Kafka API compatible, in their words. | Local disk and Raft. Their enterprise edition documents tiered storage. |
| Apache Iggy | Rust. Apache-2.0. One binary. | Its own protocol over QUIC, TCP, WebSocket, and HTTP. The Kafka wire gateway is in development and not in a release. | Its own persistent log on disk. An acknowledgement is Iggy's, not a Kafka acks setting, until that gateway ships. |
| Nisshi | Rust. Apache-2.0. Stateless brokers in front of a storage engine. | Kafka wire generated from the 3.9.1 descriptors. Their README says 4.x clients negotiate down, idempotent produce works, and transactions are unsupported. | PostgreSQL, SQLite, S3, or memory. The storage engine holds the log. Brokers keep none of it. |
| WarpStream | Go. Commercial, usage-priced, BYOC. Their October 2026 summary calls the agent a single stateless binary. Source is not published under an OSI license there. | Kafka protocol, in their words. | Object storage only. They describe the agent as diskless and free of a KRaft quorum. You pay them to run it. |
| Bufstream | Closed source. On 8 May 2026 Buf announced that CoreWeave had acquired it for CoreWeave's own platform. | Buf called it an Apache Kafka-compatible streaming platform. It is no longer a product you can buy from Buf. | Was an object-storage design. The announcement is the current source. Treat older feature lists as historical. |
| NATS JetStream | Go. Apache-2.0. One binary. | Its own protocol. A Kafka client does not connect to it. | A file or memory store on the server, replicated by the cluster. |
| Apache Pulsar | Java. Apache-2.0. Brokers plus BookKeeper, and often ZooKeeper or a metadata store. | Its own protocol. Kafka clients need a separate protocol handler. | BookKeeper ledgers. Tiered offload to object storage is a later copy. |
Sources
- AutoMQ license and the open-source S3 WAL latency note: licensing, architecture, repository.
- Redpanda license: licensing overview, BSL text.
- Apache Iggy Kafka gateway status: repository README.
- Nisshi wire version and transactions: repository README.
- WarpStream, October 2026: executive summary.
- Bufstream: CoreWeave acquires Bufstream, 8 May 2026.
When not to use Camus
A job queue that acknowledges one message at a time wants a queue, not a log. BullMQ and Restate are the usual answers in that conversation. A large Kafka deployment whose JVM and disk cost is already fine has little reason to move. The measured limits, including the object-storage p99, are on the production page.