What is Apache Pulsar?
Apache Pulsar is an open-source, distributed messaging and streaming platform built for the cloud. It is an all-in-one platform supporting both individual message consumption and stream processing at scale with sub-10ms latency.
Apache Pulsar pricing
We don't have Apache Pulsar's full plan breakdown yet (its pricing page resisted automated reading). Here's what we could confirm. Always check live pricing for exact numbers.
What Apache Pulsar does
The capabilities that matter for message queues, normalised so it lines up with every alternative. “-” means we haven't confirmed it, not that it's missing.
- Messaging paradigm
- Log / streaming
- Delivery guarantee
- Exactly-once
- Ordering guarantee
- Per-partition
- Durable replayable log
- ✓
- Message replay / rewind
- ✓
- Wire protocol
- Pulsar binary, Kafka (KoP), RabbitMQ, MQTT (MoP), AMQP
- Kafka-protocol compatible
- ✓
- Partitioned horizontal scaling
- ✓
- Geo / cross-region replication
- ✓
- Consumer groups / competing consumers
- ✓
- Dead-letter queue
- -
- Managed cloud offering exists
- -
- Hosting
- Cloud + self-hosted
- Built-in stream processing
- ✓
Platform & deployment
Independently observed- CLI
- Web
- Cloud / SaaS
- Self-hosted
Integrations (50)
Independently observed- Aerospike
- AWS Lambda
- AWS SQS
- Azure Data Explorer
- Azure DocumentDB
- Cassandra
- Couchbase
- Datadog
- Debezium
- DynamoDB
- Elasticsearch
- Flume
- Geode
- Google BigQuery
- Grafana
- HBase
- HDFS
- InfluxDB
- Kafka
- Kinesis
- Kinetica
- Kudu
- Logstash
- MarkLogic
- MongoDB
- MQTT
- Neo4j
- New Relic
- NiFi
- PostgreSQL
- Presto
- RabbitMQ
- Redis
- SAP HANA
- SingleStore
- Snowflake
- Solr
- Splunk
- Terraform
- XTDB
- Zeebe
- Canal
- CoAP
- File
- Function Mesh
- JMS
- Netty
- NSQ
- PLC4X
- RocketMQ
Apache Pulsar alternatives
Other message queues we track, ranked by the same independent score.
- Apache KafkaDistributed event streaming platform for high-performance data pipelines and streaming analyticslow · 26%
- NATSlow · 30%
- Temporalmedium · 59%
- RedpandaHigh-performance Kafka-compatible streaming platform for real-time data and AI agentslow · 45%
- RabbitMQlow · 26%
- WarpStream10x Cheaper Than Kafkamedium · 62%
The Vioscale score: one lens on the evidence
Not user reviews and not a paid placement: a confidence-weighted blend of the independent signals below (adoption, activity, security posture, and more), which you can sort and re-weight yourself. Vendors can correct their listing but can never move their rank, and stars are weighted low as a vanity metric. It is one way to read the evidence for Apache Pulsar, not the verdict.
| Signal | Score | Weight | Contribution | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Github Activity | 59 | 0.10 | 6.2 | ✓ |
| Capabilities | 87 | 0.07 | 6.1 | ✓ |
| Integrations | 57 | 0.09 | 5.3 | ✓ |
| Price Level | 100 | 0.05 | 4.7 | ✓ |
| Github Stars | 79 | 0.03 | 2.3 | ✓ |
| Pricing Transparency | 25 | 0.07 | 1.8 | ✓ |
| Reliability | 0 | 0.17 | 0.0 | - |
| Release Cadence | 0 | 0.06 | 0.0 | - |
| Security Posture | 0 | 0.13 | 0.0 | - |
| Package Downloads | 0 | 0.15 | 0.0 | - |
| Stackoverflow Activity | 0 | 0.07 | 0.0 | - |
Computed . Re-weight it by intent, or see the full method.
All data & sourcesshow ↓
Every value we hold, with its source, retrieval date, and confidence. This is the evidence behind the score: don't trust it, verify it.
Activity
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Commits last 30d | 73 | mediumsource · 2026-08-01 · 65% |
Adoption
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Github stars | 15,300 | highsource · 2026-08-01 · 90% |
Features
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Capabilities | {"hosting":"both","ordering":"per_partition","paradigm":"log_stream","protocol":"Pulsar binary, Kafka (KoP), RabbitMQ, MQTT (MoP), AMQP","message_replay":true,"persistent_log":true,"consumer_groups":true,"geo_replication":true,"kafka_compatible":true,"stream_processing":true,"delivery_guarantee":"exactly_once","horizontal_scaling":true} | mediumsource · 2026-08-05 · 60% |
Integrations
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Count | 91 | mediumsource · 2026-08-05 · 60% |
Language
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Java | highsource · 2026-08-01 · 90% |
License
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Spdx | Apache-2.0 | highsource · 2026-08-01 · 95% |