I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s biggest differentiator from a typical messaging system is the ability to rewind and reconsume messages.  It&#x27;s meant to offload a large volume of data quickly and then retain it for some time so that it can processed later on.  Data is published to topics and it is entirely feasible to read from one (or more topics), process that data and then publish the results to a different topic.  In comparison to Redis, I would say that while they overlap they&#x27;re each better suited for different problems.  Redis is blazing fast, but it&#x27;s parallelism&#x2F;replication story isn&#x27;t as great as Kafka&#x27;s.  Redis is a lot easier to get running though.