NorthGuard looks like a clean sheet redesign of Kafka. The OSS Kafka community has taken a long time to implement things like KRaft, which addressed metadata scalability concerns by storing metadata in the brokers themselves (it used to be in a separate data store called ZooKeeper which was operationally complicated). NorthGuard also supports splitting and merging ranges of keys without repartitioning the entire existing dataset. The way records are assigned to partitions is a big problem in running Apache Kafka at scale because it requires predicting the key distribution and number of partitions ahead of time.

Confluent is 11 years old and IPOed several years ago. It was founded by 3 ex-LinkedIn people who originally designed Kafka. 2 of the 3 founders are still at the company. LinkedIn never used Confluent, Confluent was a company founded to sell an enterprise version of the open source project (and later a cloud version).