klite

A Kafka-compatible broker in a single Go binary. No ZooKeeper. No KRaft. Just one process.

Up and running in 5 seconds

# Download
curl -L https://github.com/klaudworks/klite/releases/latest/download/klite-$(uname -s | tr A-Z a-z)-$(uname -m) -o klite && chmod +x klite

# Start
./klite

# Produce & consume (in another terminal)
echo "hello klite" | kcat -P -b localhost:9092 -t my-topic
kcat -C -b localhost:9092 -t my-topic -e

Or with Docker:

docker run -p 9092:9092 ghcr.io/klaudworks/klite

Why klite?

	klite	Apache Kafka	Redpanda
Deployment	Single binary	3+ brokers + controllers	Single binary (C++)
Dependencies	None	ZooKeeper or KRaft	None
Resource usage	~20 MB RAM idle	1+ GB RAM per broker	1+ GB RAM
Storage	WAL + S3	Local disks	Local disks
Wire compatible	Kafka 4.0+ protocol	N/A	Kafka protocol
Best for	Dev, staging, small prod	Large-scale production	Medium-to-large prod

Features

Drop-in Kafka replacement — Any Kafka client (franz-go, librdkafka, Java, Python) works without code changes
Consumer groups — Full group coordination with JoinGroup, SyncGroup, Heartbeat, and rebalancing
Transactions & idempotency — Exactly-once semantics with transactional produce and consume
S3 tiered storage — WAL for hot data, automatic flush to S3 for durability and cost efficiency
SASL authentication — PLAIN and SCRAM-SHA-256/512 authentication
Zero configuration — Starts with sane defaults, configure only what you need