Kafka Connect, an open source component of Apache Kafka, is a framework for connecting Kafka with external systems such as databases, key-value stores, search indexes, and file systems. Using Kafka Connect, you can deploy connector implementations for common data sources and sinks to move data into and out of Kafka. https://docs.confluent.io/current/connect/index.html Kafka Streams is a client library for building applications and microservices, where the input and output data are stored in an Apache Kafka cluster. It combines the simplicity of writing and deploying standard Java and Scala applications on the client side with the benefits of Kafka’s server-side cluster technology. https://docs.confluent.io/current/streams/index.html