Liftbridge

Judgement

What it is

Building block

What it does

Adds Kafka-style durable, replicated, ordered message streams on top of NATS as a single Go binary.

Adopt it when

You already run NATS and want log-style streams, though NATS JetStream now does this natively.

Watch out

NATS JetStream has largely replaced it, and it went quiet for years before a new company took over maintenance.

Ready for

Experimental

Runs as

Self-hosted server

Built with

Go, NATS and gRPC

How established

Established: started 9 years ago, latest release v26.01.1.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Liftbridge → Go → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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