What is the difference between kafka and kafka-cli

Question

I found there are several kafka in the maven repo.

There are two kafka in the maven repo from apache. https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.kafka/kafka https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.kafka/kafka-clients

Both of them can produce mesg and consume msg from kafka server.

I want to know the reason for create two kinds of client.

Is there any difference and which one is better?

Answer 1

Both of them can produce mesg and consume msg from kafka server

There is only one clients package, it's included as part of the other. Look at the compile dependencies section under the section where you can copy the POM

If you don't plan on running an embedded Kafka server or any other runtime core dependency of Kafka (such as Kafka Connect or Kafka Streams) or Zookeeper Server, you only need the kafka-clients package