Apache Pekko is a fork of Akka 2.6.2 originally released in 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.

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 commits for their upcoming 1.1 release which breaks API compatibility that could make migrations to Akka difficult. We will periodically review Pekko SDK additions for incorporation to work around any incompatibilities.

  Pekko 1.1.2 Akka 22.10 Akka 23.05 Akka 23.10 Akka 24.05 Akka 24.10
Release Date October 6, 2024 October 26, 2022 May 16, 2023 October 31, 2023 May 22, 2024 October 29th, 2024
Bugs Fixed 21 since 1.0 release 16 17 10 2 5
Indemnified CVEs N/A 16 7 10 3 3
Compliance N/A N/A SOC 2 SOC 2 SOC2, NIST CSF SOC2, NIST CSF
Features Added Release Notes
  • Brokerless messaging
  • Projections over gRPC
  • Persistence plugin for Postgres and Yugabyte
  • Java 17 support
  • Scala 3.1 support
  • More in Release Notes
  • Akka Distributed Clustering
  • Active-Active clustering
  • Replicated event sourcing
  • Rolling updates in Kubernetes
  • Sharded daemon scaling
  • Thread starvation detector
  • More in Release Notes
  • Akka Edge
  • Scaling to zero
  • GraalVM native image
  • Lightweight Kubernetes support
  • In-memory database support via H2
  • Starting projection from snapshot
  • Scalability for projections
  • More in Release Notes
  • Java 21 support
  • Zero Trust security
  • NIST CSF compliance
  • Database sharding for cost-effective scale out
  • GraalVM native image support
  • Rust language support for edge devices
  • More in Release Notes
  • Dynamo DB persistence
  • EventSourcedBehavior using Java 21
  • R2DBC Projections improvements
  • Shard allocation efficiencies 
  • Migration to Replicated Event Sourcing
  • License key is now required
  • More in Release Notes
Apache v2 Date* Since July 13, 2023 October 26, 2025 May 16, 2026 October 31, 2026 May 22, 2027 October 29th, 2027