Buying snapshot
Scroll sideways to see all columns. With a keyboard, focus this table and use the arrow keys.
| Decision point | What Microsoft states |
|---|---|
Protocols | AMQP, HTTPS and Apache Kafka. Kafka support and Schema Registry are available on Standard, Premium and Dedicated, not Basic. |
Resilience | Geo-disaster recovery and geo-replication; geo-replication is available on Premium and Dedicated only. |
Certifications | CSA STAR, ISO, SOC, GxP, HIPAA, HITRUST and PCI. |
Azure integration | Connects natively with Stream Analytics for a serverless streaming pipeline. |
Our take
Choose Event Hubs when you need managed, high-volume event ingestion on Azure, particularly to move existing Kafka producers without rewriting them or to land the same stream in Azure storage for batch work. Basic fits only short-lived streams that need neither Kafka nor Capture.
Evaluate Azure Event Hubs
Popular comparisons
See all 5 Azure Event Hubs comparisons
Where it stands out
Kafka without running Kafka. Existing Kafka clients and applications can talk to Event Hubs without code changes, giving you a managed Kafka experience without managing your own clusters.
One stream for real-time and batch. Event Hubs Capture sends data to Blob Storage or Data Lake Storage for long-term retention or micro-batch processing, and Microsoft says it does not reduce the egress rate available to readers.
Partitions are free to plan ahead. There is no fixed charge for partitions, so you can create enough for peak load up front and pay for throughput only when traffic needs it.
Product screenshot
Trade-offs to weigh
You manage capacity. Throughput units are selected explicitly. If traffic across a namespace exceeds the selected allowance, senders or receivers are throttled and get quota-exceeded errors.
Self-serve scale stops at 20 throughput units. Basic and Standard namespaces can reach 20 throughput units through self-service; Standard can go to 40 by support ticket, and Microsoft does not guarantee immediate capacity above 20 per subscription. Beyond 40, Microsoft recommends Dedicated.
Pricing and billing conditions
Event Hubs bills an hourly capacity rate plus usage, with no upfront cost or termination fees. Basic and Standard buy throughput units (each 1 MB/s ingress and 2 MB/s egress, billed hourly at the highest number selected in that hour and shared by all event hubs in a namespace); Premium buys processing units and Dedicated buys capacity units. Dedicated is charged in one-hour increments with a four-hour minimum. Microsoft labels the rates below as estimates that vary with your agreement, purchase date and currency, and lists them by region.
Scroll sideways to see all columns. With a keyboard, focus this table and use the arrow keys.
| Tier | Capacity rate | Ingress events | Capture | Retention and storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Basic | $0.015/hour per throughput unit | $0.028 per million events | Not available | Up to 1 day; 84 GB of storage |
Standard | $0.03/hour per throughput unit | $0.028 per million events | $73/month per throughput unit | Up to 7 days; 84 GB of storage per throughput unit |
Premium | $1.233/hour per processing unit | Included | Included | Up to 90 days; 1 TB per processing unit included, then $0.12/GB/month |
Dedicated | $6.849/hour per capacity unit | Included | Included | Up to 90 days; 10 TB per capacity unit included, then $0.12/GB/month |
Ingress events are billed in 64 KB units: an 8 KB message counts as one event, a 96 KB message as two. Consumed events and management calls are not billable ingress but count toward the throughput unit allowance.
Geo-replication adds a data transfer charge per GB replicated, by the primary region's zone: $0.09 (North America and Europe), $0.12 (Asia, Oceania, Middle East and Africa) or $0.23 (South America).
Connections: HTTPS sending has no connection charge. AMQP connections are metered after the first 100 concurrent per Basic namespace and the first 1,000 per subscription on Standard; Dedicated has no separate brokered connection charge.
Capture storage: Capture writes to a storage account you provide, so that account's usage charges are billed to your Azure subscription.
Public signals
About these signals
Verified factual signals from public sources. They indicate observable activity or interest, not total adoption, product quality, or cost.
2.0M PyPI weekly downloads150.5k npm weekly downloads0 vulnerabilities across 2 packages
See all signals from 5 sources
npm · @azure/event-hubs@6.0.4 · PyPI · azure-eventhub@5.15.1
Alternatives to Azure Event Hubs
The reviewed substitutes for Azure Event Hubs among the event streaming platforms, and what would make each one the better answer.
Direct alternatives
Reviewed substitutes: products bought for the same job, where a team picks one.
- Apache Pulsar
- Apache Pulsar and Azure Event Hubs are platforms for taking in and distributing high-volume event streams. Event Hubs is a managed Azure service that Microsoft operates for the customer. Pulsar is an open-source Apache project that a team can host anywhere, with storage kept apart from the brokers so each scales on its own.Applies to: Choosing between these two for the event streaming decision.
- Apache Kafka
- An event backbone that ingests large streams of data from apps and devices can be built on Apache Kafka or on Azure Event Hubs. Event Hubs is Microsoft's fully managed service on Azure and accepts clients written for the Kafka protocol. Kafka is open source and portable across clouds and data centers, with a large connector and stream-processing ecosystem around it.Applies to: Choosing between these two for the event streaming decision.
Other approaches
A different approach to the same problem. Each substitutes only for the workload named beside it.
- Confluent
- Confluent is an alternative to Azure Event Hubs for managed Kafka and connector-heavy real-time integration workloads. **Confluent** is a data-streaming platform built on Apache Kafka and Apache Flink, providing a managed Kafka service, an enterprise Kafka distribution, and more than 120 pre-built connectors for real-time data integration.
- AWS Kinesis
- AWS Kinesis is chosen instead of Azure Event Hubs for AWS-native real-time ingestion and analytics workloads. **AWS Kinesis** is a managed streaming service for collecting, processing, and analyzing real-time data and video streams, including log, event, and IoT analytics.
- Redpanda
- Redpanda is preferred over Azure Event Hubs for Kafka-compatible streaming workloads requiring governed agent context and SQL access across live and historical records. **Redpanda** is a Kafka API-compatible streaming platform designed to remove operational components commonly associated with Apache Kafka, including ZooKeeper and JVM dependencies.
Related technologies
Normally used together rather than chosen between, so these are not alternatives.
- Apache Airflow
- A streaming service carries events continuously; an orchestrator schedules and sequences batch work. They operate on different timescales and are commonly deployed together, so the reader's question is which one a given workload belongs to.Applies to: Whether work belongs on a continuous stream or in a scheduled batch pipeline.