Redpanda is a streaming data platform built from the ground up in C++ as a modern alternative to Apache Kafka. Using the Seastar framework's thread-per-core architecture, Redpanda maximizes hardware utilization and eliminates the latency overhead associated with Kafka's JVM-based design. The result is a system that achieves up to 10x lower p99 tail latencies while maintaining full compatibility with the Kafka wire protocol, meaning existing Kafka clients, connectors, and tooling work without modification.
The platform ships as a single self-contained binary that includes a message broker, schema registry compatible with the Confluent Schema Registry API, an HTTP proxy for REST-based access, and a WebAssembly-based data transforms engine for in-broker stream processing. This eliminates the operational complexity of managing ZooKeeper or KRaft clusters alongside the broker. Redpanda uses the Raft consensus protocol natively for replication, providing strong consistency guarantees without external coordination services.
Backed by over $165 million in venture funding, Redpanda is available as both a self-hosted community edition under the BSL license and a fully managed cloud service. It has been adopted by organizations running high-throughput event streaming workloads where Kafka's operational overhead or tail latency profile became a bottleneck. With nearly 12,000 GitHub stars and an active contributor community, Redpanda represents the leading C++ alternative in the event streaming space.
