Ellen Friedman compares and contrasts Apache Kafka with MapR streams:
What’s the difference in MapR Streams and Kafka Streams?
This one’s easy: Different technologies for different purposes. There’s a difference between messagingtechnologies (Apache Kafka, MapR Streams) versus tools for processing streaming data (such as Apache Flink, Apache Spark Streaming, Apache Apex). Kafka Streams is a soon-to-be-released processing tool for simple transformations of streaming data. The more useful comparison is between its processing capabilities and those of more full-service stream processing technologies such as Spark Streaming or Flink.
Despite the similarity in names, Kafka Streams aims at a different purpose than MapR Streams. The latter was released in January 2016. MapR Streams is a stream messaging system that is integrated into the MapR Converged Platform. Using the Apache Kafka 0.9 API, MapR Streams provides a way to deliver messages from a range of data producer types (for instance IoT sensors, machine logs, clickstream data) to consumers that include but are not limited to real-time or near real-time processing applications.
This also includes an interesting discussion of how the same term, “broker,” can be used in two different products in the same general product space and mean two distinct things.