Apache Pulsar vs Memphis

This section describes the differeneces between Pulsar and Memphis

What is Apache Pulsar?

Apache Pulsar is an open-source distributed messaging system. Originally developed as a queuing system, it has been broadened in recent releases to add event streaming features. Pulsar makes use of Apache BookKeeper™ for its storage layer—a project created at Yahoo as a high-availability solution to Hadoop's HDFS NameNode (although not ultimately used for that use case). It shares properties with both Kafka and RabbitMQ. Pulsar is a largely community-led project with no enterprise-grade commercial backing today.

What is Memphis.dev?

Memphis.dev is a next-generation alternative to traditional message brokers.

It enables building modern queue-based applications that require large volumes of streamed and enriched data, modern protocols, zero ops, up to x9 faster development, up to x46 fewer costs, and significantly lower dev time for data-oriented developers and data engineers.

Low footprint, highly resilient, cloud-native, and run on any Kubernetes, on any cloud.

General

Parameter	Memphis.dev	Apache Pulsar
License	BSL 1.0	Apache 2.0
Components	Memphis + PostgreSQL	Pulsar + Zookeeper + BookKeeper + RocksDB
Message consumption model	Pull	Push
Storage architecture	Log	Index

Ecosystem and User Experience

Parameter	Memphis.dev	Apache Pulsar
Deployment	Made through helm or docker compose. Made out of two main components: broker and metadata store	Requires four components be configured and understood: Pulsar servers (brokers) plus Apache BookKeeper (bookies) plus Apache ZooKeeper servers as well as the RocksDB database used by BookKeeper
Enterprise support	Yes	Yes
Managed cloud offerings	Yes	Yes
Self-Healing	Yes	No
Notifications	Yes	No
Message tracing (aka Stream lineage)	Yes	No
Storage balancing	Automatic based on policy	No

Availability and Messaging

Parameter	Memphis.dev	Apache Pulsar
Mirroring (Replication)	Yes	Yes
Multi-tenancy	Yes	Yes
Ordering guarantees	Consumer group level	Partition level
Storage tiering	Yes	No
Permanent storage	Yes	Messages get deleted after ACK
Delivery guarantees	At least once, Exactly once	Exactly once
Idempotency	Yes	Yes
Geo-Replication (Multi-region)	Yes	Yes

Added Features

Parameter	Memphis.dev	Apache Pulsar
GUI	Native	3rd Party
Dead-letter Queue	Yes	No
Schema Enforcement	Yes	Yes
Message routing	Yes	Yes
Log compaction	Yes	Yes
Message replay, time travel	Yes	Yes
Stream Enrichment	SQL and custom code functions	SQL-based functions
Pull retry mechanism	Yes	Client responsibility

Summary

Memphis.dev is a pure distributed log designed for efficient event streaming and processing at a high scale. Pulsar is not a distributed log in the true sense, but it synthesizes some similar properties, but the main difference would.