Redpanda, a C++-based data streaming platform, significantly outperforms Apache Kafka in terms of latency and throughput under various workloads, as demonstrated in a comprehensive performance analysis. The study utilized identical hardware and configuration settings, running on AWS with TLS and SASL-SCRAM enabled, to simulate real-world customer environments. Redpanda maintained stable latencies even at high throughput levels, demonstrating up to 70 times faster performance than Kafka, which struggled to maintain latency consistency and required significantly more hardware to approach Redpanda's performance. The analysis also highlighted Redpanda's ability to operate efficiently on ARM-based hardware, offering substantial cost savings and a reduced hardware footprint while supporting high throughput levels, making it a compelling choice for performance-critical applications.