Adoption & Ecosystem
Who uses it
The organisations below are self-reported in the project's ADOPTERS.md, which records each adopter's use case. The list also includes CERN, SBB CFF FFS, Swisscom, Atruvia, DPG Media, Skillsoft, and Banco Mercantil, and vendors such as Axual and Ænix.
| Organisation | Use case | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Runs a Kafka fleet of 500 brokers with Strimzi, data replication via MirrorMaker, and CDC via Kafka Connect | ADOPTERS.md | |
| Decathlon | Data integration with Kafka Connect and Strimzi on Kubernetes | ADOPTERS.md |
| AppsFlyer | Many high-throughput clusters at tens of millions of messages per second on local ephemeral storage | ADOPTERS.md |
| Vera C. Rubin Observatory | Observatory Control System and telemetry platform | ADOPTERS.md |
Adoption signals
At CNCF Incubating promotion in February 2024, the project reported more than 1600 contributors, more than 180 contributing organisations, and 15 public adopters (CNCF blog). GitHub statistics observed on 2026-06-24 via the GitHub API: 5,843 stars, 1,507 forks, 145 open issues, repository created 2016-05-06 (GitHub repo).
Ecosystem
Strimzi integrates with a number of Kafka-adjacent components, managed through custom resources: Cruise Control for rebalancing (KafkaRebalance), Kafka Connect and MirrorMaker2, the Kafka Bridge for HTTP-to-Kafka, and Kafka Exporter feeding Prometheus and Grafana. It ships an OpenTelemetry tracing agent, integrates with cert-manager for TLS, and supports OAuth and OIDC authentication. Governance is defined in a separate governance repository. Vendors build on it too, for example Ænix uses Strimzi for Kafka as a Service in Cozystack.
Alternatives
Strimzi runs upstream Apache Kafka unchanged under neutral CNCF governance and a fully open-source Apache-2.0 license. Its main distinction from new broker projects is that it is not a broker at all; it is an operator that runs Kafka.
| Alternative | Differs by |
|---|---|
| Confluent for Kubernetes | Proprietary operator from Confluent, tied to the Confluent platform rather than vendor-neutral |
| Koperator (Banzai Cloud) | A separate open-source Kafka operator implementation with a different architecture |
| NATS / Pulsar | Different messaging systems entirely, not ways to run Apache Kafka on Kubernetes |