Compare Azure Event Hubs tiers

Azure Event Hubs is a big data streaming platform and event ingestion service. It offers four tiers that differ in features, performance, capacity, and isolation. This article compares those tiers so you can choose the one that best fits your workload.

This article compares the following tiers:

  • Basic: A low-cost entry point for simple streaming scenarios that need only basic features.
  • Standard: A general-purpose tier for most streaming workloads, with support for Event Hubs Capture, Apache Kafka, and geo-disaster recovery.
  • Premium: A tier that provides resource isolation, higher performance, and enhanced security for mission-critical workloads. For more information, see Overview of Event Hubs Premium.

Note

This article compares only the features and quotas of each tier. For pricing, see Azure Event Hubs pricing.

Choose a tier

This section helps you narrow down the most likely tiers for your needs:

  • Choose Basic for simple, low-volume streaming where you need a single consumer group and short retention.
  • Choose Standard for most production workloads that need multiple consumer groups, Event Hubs Capture, Apache Kafka support, and geo-disaster recovery.
  • Choose Premium when you need predictable performance through resource isolation, longer retention, customer-managed keys, or dynamic partition scale-out, without managing a dedicated cluster.

Use this list as a starting point, then use the following sections to compare the tiers in detail.

Features

The following table shows the list of features that are available (or not available) in a specific tier of Azure Event Hubs.

Feature Basic Standard Premium
Tenancy Multitenant Multitenant Multitenant with resource isolation
Private link N/A Yes Yes
Customer-managed key
(bring your own key)
N/A N/A Yes
Capture N/A Priced separately Included
Dynamic partitions scale-out N/A N/A Yes
Ingress events Pay per million events Pay per million events Included
Runtime audit logs N/A N/A Yes
Availability zone Yes Yes Yes
Geo-disaster recovery N/A Yes Yes
IP firewall N/A Yes Yes

Note

Included in the table means the feature is available and there's no separate charge for using it.

Quotas

The following table shows limits that are different for Basic, Standard, Premium tiers.

Note

  • In the table, CU is capacity unit, PU is processing unit, and TU is throughput unit.
  • You can configure TUs for a Basic or Standard tier namespace or PUs for a Premium tier namespace.
Limit Basic Standard Premium
Maximum size of Event Hubs publication 256 KB 1 MB 1 MB
Number of consumer groups per event hub 1 20 100
Number of Kafka consumer groups per namespace NA 1,000 1,000
Number of brokered connections per namespace 100 5,000 10,000 per PU

For example, if the namespace is assigned 4 PUs, the limit is 40,000.
Maximum retention period of event data 1 day 7 days 90 days
Event storage for retention 84 GB per TU 84 GB per TU 1 TB per PU
Maximum TUs or PUs or CUs 40 TUs 40 TUs 16 PUs
Number of partitions per event hub 32 32 100 per event hub, but there's a limit of 200 per PU at the namespace level.

For example, if a namespace is assigned 2 PUs, the limit for total number of partitions in all event hubs in the namespace is 2 * 200 = 400.
Number of namespaces per subscription per region 1,000 (all tiers) 1,000 (all tiers) 1,000 (all tiers)
Number of event hubs per namespace 10 10 100 per PU
Capture N/A Pay per hour Included
Size of compacted event hub N/A 1 GB per partition 250 GB per partition
Size of the schema registry (namespace) in megabytes N/A 25 100
Number of schema groups in a schema registry or namespace N/A 1: excluding the default group 100
1 MB per schema
Number of schema versions across all schema groups N/A 25 1,000
Throughput per unit Ingress: 1 MB/sec or 1000 events per second
Egress: 2 MB/sec or 4,096 events per second
Ingress: 1 MB/sec or 1,000 events per second
Egress: 2 MB/sec or 4,096 events per second
No limits per PU *

* Depends on factors such as resource allocation, number of partitions, and storage.

Note

You can publish events individually or batched. The publication limit (according to tier) applies regardless of whether it's a single event or a batch. Publishing events larger than the maximum threshold is rejected.

For pricing information for each tier, see Azure Event Hubs pricing.