Hi everyone 
I have just started to learn Apache Kafka. My employers however, are using Confluent Kafka… I want to know:
a) whats the difference between the two? and
b) how do I get competent at both?
Hi @jiyeke . Apache Kafka is an open source project under the Apache Software Foundation. Confluent, which was founded by the team that originally created Apache Kafka, offers two solutions built using Kafka :
- Confluent Platform (self-managed / on-premise solution) and
- Confluent Cloud (fully-managed cloud solution).
To learn more, I would suggest looking at the resources available at the Confluent Developer website (at developer.confluent.io). The website has free video courses, tutorials, blogs and more.
By the way, welcome to the Confluent Community Forum @jiyeke ! 
If you have any questions about using this forum, you can always ask me. Also, check out the Confluent Community Slack space!
Welcome @jiyeke!
@vnadkarni has answered your question well, I would just add a couple more things.
There’s no such thing as Confluent Kafka. Confluent includes Kafka within its distribution, but as @vnadkarni said, Kafka owned by the ASF and so it is only ever Apache Kafka.
Confluent have built ecosystem component around Apache Kafka, including:
- ksqlDB (streaming database)
- Schema Registry
- REST Proxy
- Web-based GUI
- Clients for Python, Go, C/C++, .NET
- Many connectors for Kafka Connect
You can get these on-premises (Confluent Platform) or in the Cloud (Confluent Cloud).
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To add to the above:
Confluent actually does not ship a vanilla Apache Kafka broker, but an enhanced Confluent Server (of course, we also use Confluent Server in Confluent Cloud), including many enterprise features (like tiered storage, cluster linking, and many more) that are not available in Apache Kafka.
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