Differences between competing consumers and Kafka

Good morning,

I’m using EventStore as the write side of a microservice. This service needs to communicate with other services so I was trying to decide between using competing consumers or Kafka.

Are there any articles comparing these two queueing systems?

What benefit does ES have over Kafka?

The main future use case I can envisage is being able to consume one message from multiple consumers, is this possible with groups?

Also, how long are messages stored for? Is this configurable?

Kind regards

Sean.