NATS JetStream vs Kafka: 4x less resources, 10-50x lower latency, single binary deploy

NATS JetStream: 2+ vCPU / 4GB RAM for production vs Kafka: 8+ vCPU / 16GB RAM (4x resources). Latency: NATS sub-millisecond in-memory, 1-5ms persisted vs Kafka 10-50ms due to batching. Throughput: Kafka leads at 500K-1M+ msg/sec vs NATS 200K-400K — but for agent messaging (not log aggregation), NATS throughput is sufficient. NATS is a single Go binary vs Kafka's multi-broker + ZooKeeper/KRaft complexity.