Between Confluent 17,245 (Confluent Cloud in Depth) and the hyperclouds (MSK, Event Hubs, Google Kafka) sits a group of independent vendors that run Kafka 129 , or something that speaks its protocol, on the cloud of your choice. One of them, Aiven, has a free Kafka plan that needs no credit card, so BookNest ran on it for real (Aiven's Free Kafka Plan); Redpanda 64,862 ran locally in Docker 514 ; StreamNative and Instaclustr are described from their documentation and were not run here. Prices are list prices in US dollars on 2 October 2026.
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Aiven, Redpanda and Others
Aiven, Redpanda and Other Independent Kafka Platforms