What is the difference between simple consumer and high level consumer?

Question

What is the difference between simple consumer and high level consumer in Apache Kafka? I could not understand from the plenty of definitions available on internet.

Answer 1

The high level consumer can manage things like offset commits and rebalancing across consumer instances in a consumer group automatically.

Using the simple consumer you have to manage partition subscription, broker leader changes and offset commits yourself. The concept of a consumer group does not exist for the simple consumer API.