segmentio/kafka-go

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

8613 stars · 858 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

kafka-go is a pure-Go Apache Kafka client library offering both low-level connection APIs and high-level Reader/Writer abstractions for producing and consuming messages. It mirrors Go standard library idioms like context support without cgo dependencies.

Use cases

• produce and consume kafka messages in go
• pure go kafka client without cgo
• read from a kafka topic with consumer groups
• write events to kafka from a go service
• build event-driven microservices with kafka
• stream processing pipelines in go

When to choose

• you want a well-documented, idiomatic Go Kafka client with context support
• you need to avoid cgo dependencies like librdkafka
• you want both low-level protocol access and high-level reader/writer APIs

When to avoid

• you need the newest Kafka protocol features immediately, as support may lag
• you require maximum throughput at extreme scale where librdkafka-based clients may outperform
• you need a client for a specific usage pattern like Kafka-as-a-message-bus (goka)

Facets

library · maturity active

message-queue http-client streaming microservices backend developer-tools go cross-platform kafka kafka-client producer consumer golang-library event-streaming messaging

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="segmentio/kafka-go")