Most of the comments are just pro-Pulsar but what's the architectural trade-off? (Non-architectural trade-off is that Pulsar is a new system to learn for folks familiar with maintaining and using Kafka.)
Pulsar is better designed than Kafka in every way with the main trade-off being more moving pieces. That's why the recommended deployment is Kubernetes which can manage all that complexity for you.
Pulsar also lacks in the size of the community and ecosystem where Kafka has much more available.
Someone linked some benchmarks here (on mobile and can’t find) that showed a single node Kafka outperforms but as soon as you start scaling Pulsar pulls ahead. I’m not familiar enough with the nitty gritty to comment beyond that.
