topic Is there support for Confluent Kafka in databricks free edition in Databricks Free Edition Help

Is there support for Confluent Kafka in databricks free edition

Suresh_Ulhasnag — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:42:43 GMT

I want to do a streaming POC using trial version of Confluent Kafka.

Will databricks free edition support it?

Re: Is there support for Confluent Kafka in databricks free edition

AbhaySingh — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:54:05 GMT

You CAN use Confluent Kafka in Databricks Free Edition, but only for micro-batch processing (not continuous real-time streaming). If you need true real-time continuous streaming with ProcessingTime triggers, you'll need a paid plan with classic compute.

Re: Is there support for Confluent Kafka in databricks free edition

Pat — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 21:26:14 GMT

Hi @Suresh_Ulhasnag ,

Yes it's supported. You can have a look at my github repo: https://github.com/cloud-data-engineer/data/blob/main/dlt_telco/docs/README.md

In bronze layer I am connecting to Confluent Kafka: https://github.com/cloud-data-engineer/data/blob/main/dlt_telco/src/bronze.py
You can see example setup there, i.e.:

# Configure Kafka security options KAFKA_SECURITY_OPTIONS = { "kafka.security.protocol": "SASL_SSL", "kafka.sasl.mechanism": "PLAIN", "kafka.sasl.jaas.config": f"org.apache.kafka.common.security.plain.PlainLoginModule required username='{api_key}' password='{api_secret}';", }