# Parsely/pykafka

Apache Kafka client for Python; high-level & low-level consumer/producer, with great performance.

Repository: https://github.com/Parsely/pykafka
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/pykafka
Homepage: http://pykafka.readthedocs.org/
Language: Python
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: kafka, python, c-extension, apache-kafka
Archived: true
Last push: 2021-01-27T10:12:19+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 5167, "days_push": 2044, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: archived
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1120, forks 222 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:39.744079+00:00)

## What it is
PyKafka is a programmer-friendly Apache Kafka client for Python offering both high-level and low-level producer/consumer APIs, optionally accelerated by a C extension built on librdkafka. It aims to provide a JVM-client-like level of abstraction with a Pythonic API, supporting Kafka 0.8.2+ and Python 2.7+/3.4+/PyPy.

## Use cases
- produce and consume messages from apache kafka in python
- stream events to a kafka topic with high throughput
- build a python consumer for a kafka event pipeline
- connect to kafka over TLS from python
- batch messages asynchronously for better kafka producer performance

## When to choose
- you need a Kafka client with a Pythonic, JVM-like API
- you want optional librdkafka-backed performance via a C extension
- you need both simple sync and high-throughput async producers

## When to avoid
- you need a client with recent Kafka feature support - the last release was in 2021
- you prefer the actively maintained confluent-kafka-python client
- you need Kafka versions or features beyond what PyKafka supports

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: maintenance
- function: message-queue, database-driver, streaming
- domain: microservices, developer-tools
- platform: python, cross-platform
- tags: apache-kafka, kafka-client, librdkafka, c-extension, producer-consumer, event-streaming, messaging, data-engineering, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- Parsely/pykafka (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:39.744079+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T06:41:04.255291+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/Parsely/pykafka (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:39.744079+00:00, sha 6242c3af304c)
  - registry_pypi: https://pypi.org/pypi/pykafka/json (fetched 2026-08-29T12:45:29.751479+00:00, sha 0ca6dd3d683a)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.