Read the official Jepsen report for Bufstream

Bufstream

Elastic, self-hosted Kafka with Advanced Semantic Intelligence
Guarantee streaming data quality and slash cloud costs 10x with Bufstream, a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka®.

Bufstream hero

Guaranteed data quality

Bufstream eliminates bad data at the broker: rather than hoping that every producer will opt into validation, Bufstream agents work with the Buf Schema Registry to enforce quality controls for all topics with Protobuf schemas. Bad data is immediately rejected, so consumers can trust that the data they receive will always match the appropriate schema and adhere to any semantic constraints.

10x lower cloud costs

Bufstream replaces traditional disks with object storage, the most reliable and cost-effective cloud storage primitive. By eliminating expensive network-attached volumes and delegating cross-zone data replication to object storage Bufstream reduces cloud costs 10x compared to Apache Kafka — while remaining fully compatible with Kafka clients, connectors, and tools.

Fully air-gapped deployment

Bufstream runs fully within your AWS or GCP VPC, giving you complete control over your data, metadata, and uptime. Unlike the alternatives, Bufstream never phones home.

Kafka to Iceberg in an instant

Bufstream directly writes your data to S3-compatible object storage with Apache Iceberg® metadata. Eliminate the need for a separate ETL pipeline and start querying your data in seconds.

Field-level RBAC

With Bufstream, you can enforce fine-grained access controls at the field level, ensuring that only the right people see the right data.

Transparent Pricing

Bufstream pricing is simple: just $0.002 per uncompressed GiB written (about $2 per TiB). We don't charge any per-core, per-agent, or per-call fees.