When comparing Kafka vs Rsyslog, the Slant community recommends Rsyslog for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Rsyslog is ranked 7th while Kafka is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Rsyslog is:
Rsyslog is a free and open source tool.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Optimized for performance
Kafka is optimized for supporting a huge number of users.
Pro Native mirroring support
Kafka has native support for mirroring.
Pro Native compression support
Kafka has native support for compression.
Pro Free and Open Source
Rsyslog is a free and open source tool.
Cons
Con Java is a resource hog
Java is a resource hog, making this far too slow unless you have money to throw at multiple servers with 1/2TB of ram.

Con Need Zookeeper
Kafka can only work with Zookeeper
Con Difficult to configure
The config is not user friendly at all compared to syslog-ng
Con Not spread to many platforms
Rsyslog is only available for Linux and Solaris.
Built By the Slant team
Lustre recommends the best products at their lowest prices – right on Amazon.