[itestyourcode]

Full disclosure - I am co-founder of https://kesque.com . We provide Pulsar as a managed service and different tiers of SaaS plan. My opinion can be biased.

For a new project, you should try to document different aspects of requirements. Is it data streaming, queuing, or both? What's the data retention policy? Message rate? How many consumers and producers? Any inbound or outbound integration with 3rd party destination (i.e. S3, Flink)? Both Kafka and Pulsar have so many features to offer. It is not a simple task to pick one vs another. If you ask for guaranteed delivery, both will satisfy that requirement. A level up question would be who can guarantee in-order delivery.

Managing Kafka and Pulsar require knowledge. I do not think any of these durable messaging software is maintenance free (or industry is not there yet). Any reliable distributed system is complex out of necessity. These system more or less require log consensus algorithm to achieve high availability. They all use either zookeeper or one of raft implementations requiring multiple nodes to perform leader election. This is common in all distributed architecture (kafka, Pulsar, Cockroach, etcd...). I would attest Pulsar can be administratively simpler than Kafka, because of separation of broker and bookkeeper (data persistent layer). But this does not mean any dev-op without knowledge can proficiently manage the cluster. We use Kubernets/Helm to manage all of our Pulsar clusters. I would not credit Pulsar alone with low operation upkeep. It is combinations of Kubernetes, Helm, in-house tools, and engineering knowledge to lower the operation cost.