Plenty of people choose Redpanda because it’s the easiest getting started experience for kafka. There is a single binary for the full broker, where I have never seen Apache Kafka as easy to setup. It’s got a great UI as well.

The quickstart to getting everything running locally all documented here: https://docs.redpanda.com/current/get-started/quick-start/#d...

Disclaimer: I work at Redpanda