Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka Alternatives (January 2026)

How do you want to manage your systems? That probably depends a lot on the type of environment you have—whether your systems are primarily on-prem, or if they reside in the cloud. Or a mixture of both. Either way, Red Hat is looking to meet you where you're at and provide management tools to suit your needs with Red Hat Smart Management.

A flexible messaging platform that enables real-time integration and connects the Internet of Things (IoT).

Confluent makes it easy to connect your apps, data systems, and entire business with secure, scalable, fully managed Kafka and real-time data streaming, processing, and analytics.

Red Hat Runtimes includes a collection of cloud-native runtimes for developing Java or JavaScript applications on OpenShift.

Redpanda is a powerful, simple, and cost-efficient streaming data platform that is compatible with Kafka® APIs while eliminating Kafka complexity.

IBM Event Streams is an event streaming software built on open-source Apache Kafka. It is available as a fully managed service on IBM Cloud or for self-hosting.

Apache Kafka: A Distributed Streaming Platform.

A single console, with built-in security policies, for controlling Kubernetes clusters and applications.

An enterprise application platform powered by Kubernetes that provides the basic functionality of Red Hat OpenShift to run containers in hybrid cloud environments.