Buying snapshot
Scroll sideways to see all columns. With a keyboard, focus this table and use the arrow keys.
| Decision point | What Redpanda states |
|---|---|
Ways to buy | Serverless (multi-tenant, fully managed), Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC: fully managed clusters hosted in your own VPC) and Enterprise Edition (you run your own Redpanda platform). |
Starting points | Community Edition, to start streaming fast with essential features. Separately, the GitHub repository offers free, prebuilt stable releases for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/RedHat/Amazon Linux and macOS (Docker required on macOS). |
Trials | Serverless: sign up within seconds, no credit card required. BYOC: contact Redpanda for a 14-day trial. Enterprise Edition: 30-day trial. |
Support | BYOC and Enterprise Edition list a 24x7 helpdesk with SLAs, a direct Slack channel, a designated account manager and access to solutions experts. |
Which option fits
Serverless is for targeted use cases with moderate, sustained traffic, plus expert support, on AWS or GCP.
BYOC is for production clusters that need data sovereignty, the highest throughput and enterprise security, while Redpanda manages the clusters inside your VPC on AWS, GCP or Azure.
Enterprise Edition is for teams that want to run Redpanda themselves and need features such as regional disaster recovery, shadowing and Kerberos or OIDC authentication.
Community Edition covers essential features; Redpanda points to Enterprise for advanced capabilities and enhanced response SLAs.
Plan terms and limits
Scroll sideways to see all columns. With a keyboard, focus this table and use the arrow keys.
| Plan | How it is bought | Where it runs, limits and SLA | What it includes |
|---|---|---|---|
Serverless | Pay as you go, or Annual Commit plan | Multi-tenant on AWS and GCP; 100 MB/s max write and 300 MB/s max read throughput; 5000 partitions; 99.9% SLA | Public networking, or private networking on AWS; SSO (Google, GitHub) and Kafka ACLs; fully managed, feature limitless storage and 300+ data connectors |
Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) | Annual commitment | In your cloud on AWS, Azure or GCP; 2 GB/s max write and 4 GB/s max read throughput; 112,500 partitions; 99.99% SLA | Public or private networking; intelligent tiered storage; automatic partition rebalancing; Apache Iceberg topics; OpenMetrics support; SSO (Google, GitHub, OIDC), RBAC and audit logs; dedicated account manager; fully managed, feature limitless storage and 300+ data connectors |
Enterprise Edition | Contact Redpanda; its pricing line reads "Contact us to compare TCO with Kafka" | Self-managed: you run your own Redpanda platform, with limitless data storage | Built-in HTTP proxy and schema registry; Prometheus support; fine-grained ACLs and TLS encryption; intelligent tiered storage; Apache Iceberg topics; shadowing; regional disaster recovery; Redpanda Console with SSO/RBAC; external authentication (Kerberos, OIDC); audit logging |
What you pay for
With Enterprise Edition, or the free GitHub releases, you run Redpanda on infrastructure you provide: Redpanda says it deploys in your cloud provider's infrastructure, a private cloud, bare metal or at the edge. Each node is a single binary with a built-in schema registry, HTTP proxy and message broker, with no ZooKeeper, KRaft or JVM to run or tune. Because Redpanda is Kafka API-compatible, Redpanda says Kafka users can migrate without application code changes.
What drives the bill
Throughput and partitions. Each managed plan has its own write, read and partition caps, so sustained traffic decides which plan you can use.
Retention. Tiered storage keeps long-term data in cloud object stores, which Redpanda says keeps cost to a minimum; S3-compatible cloud storage is the default storage for all streaming data.
Multi-AZ traffic. Follower fetching lets consumers read from the closest replica of a partition, which Redpanda says reduces network costs for multi-AZ deployments.
Costs that are easy to miss
Serverless support. Enterprise support on Serverless is available only with an annual commitment, so pay-as-you-go alone does not include it.
Redpanda Connect. Its 290+ pre-built connectors are free to use; support and enterprise features need a purchased plan.
BYOC cloud resources. BYOC clusters are hosted in your own VPC, so ask Redpanda which resources appear on your own cloud bill beside the annual commitment.
Our take
If your traffic fits the Serverless caps, start there: sign-up needs no card and you can pay as you go. If you need data sovereignty or higher throughput, plan for BYOC's annual commitment; if you want to run Redpanda yourself, Enterprise Edition pricing comes through contacting Redpanda. Either way, compare against your current Kafka setup at the same throughput, retention and availability needs.