Apache Pekko is a fork of Akka 2.6.2 (September 2022). It is a member project of the Apache Software Foundation and licensed as Apache v2.

Apache Pekko released version 1.0 on July 13, 2023. Pekko does not provide a compatibility and interoperability policy statement between Akka and Pekko for SDKs, binaries, or modules. Pekko has stated that Akka and Pekko nodes are not able to form clusters together. Pekko has multiple unresolved runtime bugs that can cause application instability. 

We provide commercial support for Pekko through migrations to Akka. We are not aware of other commercial software vendors providing a Pekko support commitment.

For more information, please contact us.

Standards Compliance

Akka has been audited and attested to be SOC 2 and NIST CSF compliant. Open source and forked versions before Akka 23.05 are not SOC 2 compliant. Organizations that require compliance with SOC 2, NIST CSF, or ISO 27001 can migrate from Pekko to Akka by obtaining a subscription.

Migration Compatibility

Pekko has made changes that break API compatibility with Akka that could make migrations to Akka difficult. Pekko does not have a fork of the Akka SDK, Akka CLI, or the Akka self-hosted operating environments. 

Apache Licensing

Akka releases automatically revert to Apache v2 licensing 36 months after their release date. Akka 22.10, which includes brokerless messaging and projections over gRPC will revert to Apache v2 in September 2025. 

  Pekko 1.1 Akka 24.10
Bugs Fixed <10 50
CVEs Indemnified N/A 45
Compliance N/A SOC2, NIST CSF
Features Added Release Notes
  • Brokerless messaging
  • Projections over gRPC
  • Persistence plugin for Postgres, Yugabyte, DynamoDB
  • Active-active clustering
  • Replicated event sourcing
  • Rolling k8s updates
  • Sharded daemon scaling
  • Thread starvation detector
  • Akka edge SDK
  • Scaling to zero
  • GraalVM native images
  • In-memory database support via H2
  • Projection from snapshot
  • ZeroTrust security
  • Database sharding
  • Java 17-21 support
  • Scala 3.1 support
  • More in Release Notes