Its a completely different use case.  Many times people call Kafka a &quot;message queue&quot; but its not.  It&#x27;s a distributed log service.  Its possible to build a message queue on top of a distributed log service but there are reasons not to.<p>Its better to think of Kafka as a database for events, not as  a transport mechanism for those events.<p>As for being bloated, Kafka lives in a very empty space, that is it supports fully ordered events to all consumers (and it has good HA options).  The only other tool that I&#x27;ve come across that gives you the same data guarantees is Kinesis and it requires AWS.<p>I&#x27;ve found that yes Kafka is complex, but its complex because its solving a complex problem, not because its bloated.<p>That said, if you want a non-ordered message queue, use NSQ instead of Kafka.