Photo by Ludde Lorentz on Unsplash
Both Platform Events and Change Data Capture (CDC) are great tools for loosely coupled integrations—but they serve different use cases.
How I decide:
Platform Events are best for intentional actions (e.g. “ReservationConfirmed”)
CDC is best for passive data sync (e.g. whenever a Contact is updated)
CDC lets downstream systems “listen” for changes to standard or custom objects. Platform Events let you design business-specific events as part of a process.
I’ve used both in tandem: CDC to sync Account changes with an external data warehouse, and Platform Events to trigger workflows in external tools. The architecture is elegant, scalable, and easy to extend.
