Hmm, none of those are released by Apache Kafka - confluent-kafka-python is, well, from Confluent, and is based on librdkafka, python-kafka is owned by, I'm not

Hmm, none of those are released by Apache Kafka - confluent-kafka-python is, well, from Confluent, and is based on librdkafka, python-kafka is owned by, I'm not sure who. What do you mean by "without blocking" though? You can set a poll timeout of 0ms, that should prevent blocking.