Amazon MSK vs Spring Cloud Data Flow comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.4, while VMware is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.8. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 6.5% mindshare in SA, compared to VMware’s 4.7% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Amazon MSK

Read 12 Amazon MSK reviews

3,311 Views
3,245 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Spring Cloud Data Flow

Read 9 Spring Cloud Data Flow reviews

3,372 Views
1,652 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Amazon MSK

Spring Cloud Data Flow

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Spring Cloud Data Flow and Amazon MSK focus on different aspects of real-time data processing. While Spring Cloud Data Flow has competitive pricing and deployment flexibility, Amazon MSK offers a wider range of integrations, making it more appealing for large-scale deployments.

Features: Spring Cloud Data Flow stands out for its flexible data flow orchestration and support for various programming languages. It effectively uses Spring components for microservices management and offers a simple programming model with auto-configuration. Amazon MSK provides seamless Apache Kafka cluster management, robust AWS integration, and features like high throughput and low latency, making it suitable for extensive data ecosystems.

Room for Improvement: Spring Cloud Data Flow could enhance its graphical environment for data visualization and offer more off-the-shelf components for easier implementation. Improvements in custom component development and a more intuitive interface would benefit users. Amazon MSK might expand features for non-AWS services, improve cost efficiency for smaller workloads, and simplify the setup for complex server communications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Spring Cloud Data Flow offers rapid deployment across various environments and has strong community support with detailed documentation. Amazon MSK excels at reducing operational complexity with its managed Kafka service and benefits from AWS's reliable customer support, providing effective problem resolution.

Pricing and ROI: Spring Cloud Data Flow leverages open-source technologies for cost-effective scaling, appealing to budget-conscious projects with promising ROI. Amazon MSK may have higher costs, but its streamlined operations and AWS integration justify the investment for businesses prioritizing scalability and comprehensive features.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon MSK vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon MSK

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

6th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Spring Cloud Data Flow

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

9th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (21st)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 6.5%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Cloud Data Flow is 4.7%, up from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

FNU AKSHANSH

Senior Data Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic

We don't have many use cases involving ingesting large amounts of data and scaling up and down. We have a clear understanding of our data volume, which remains relatively constant throughout the week. While we're aware of other features Amazon MSK offers, we feel confident in our current setup. If our requirements change significantly in the future, we'll reassess our needs and consider adopting Amazon MSK.

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NitinGoyal

Engineering Lead at Naukri.com

Has a plug-and-play model and provides good robustness and scalability

The solution's community support could be improved. I don't know why the Spring Cloud Data Flow community is not very strong. Community support is very limited whenever you face any problem or are stuck somewhere. I'm not sure whether it has improved in the last six months because this pipeline was set up almost two years ago. I struggled with that a lot. For example, there was limited support whenever I got an exception and sought help from Stack Overflow or different forums. Interacting with Kubernetes needs a few certificates. You need to define all the certificates within your application. With the help of those certificates, your Java application or Spring Cloud Data Flow can interact with Kubernetes. I faced a lot of hurdles while placing those certificates. Despite following the official documentation to define all the replicas, readiness, and liveliness probes within the Spring Cloud Data Flow application, it was not working. So, I had to troubleshoot while digging in and debugging the internals of Spring Cloud Data Flow at that time. It was just a configuration mismatch, and I was doing nothing weird. There was a small spelling difference between how Spring Cloud Data Flow was expecting it and how I passed it. I was just following the official documentation.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Amazon MSK has good integration because our team has been undergoing significant changes. Coupling it with MSK within AWS is helpful. We don't have to set up additionals or monitor external environments. This"

"It is a stable product."

"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."

"It offers good stability."

"Amazon MSK's separation of concerns and ease of creating and deploying new features are highly valuable. It just requires to assign them to the topic, and then anyone who needs to consume these messages can do so directly from Amazon MSK. This separation of concerns makes it very convenient, especially for new feature development, as developers can easily access the messages they need without having to deal with complex server communications or protocol setups."

"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."

"The solution's technical support was helpful."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."

More Amazon MSK pros

"The best thing I like about Spring Cloud Data Flow is its plug-and-play model."

"The ease of deployment on Kubernetes, the seamless integration for orchestration of various pipelines, and the visual dashboard that simplifies operations even for non-specialists such as quality analysts."

"The most valuable features of Spring Cloud Data Flow are the simple programming model, integration, dependency Injection, and ability to do any injection. Additionally, auto-configuration is another important feature because we don't have to configure the database and or set up the boilerplate in the database in every project. The composability is good, we can create small workloads and compose them in any way we like."

"The product is very user-friendly."

"There are a lot of options in Spring Cloud. It's flexible in terms of how we can use it. It's a full infrastructure."

"The dashboards in Spring Cloud Dataflow are quite valuable."

"The most valuable feature is real-time streaming."

"The solution's most valuable feature is that it allows us to use different batch data sources, retrieve the data, and then do the data processing, after which we can convert and store it in the target."

Cons

"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."

"In my opinion, there are areas in Amazon MSK that could be improved, particularly in terms of configuration. Initially setting it up and getting it connected was quite challenging. The naming conventions for policies were updated by AWS, and some were undocumented, leading to confusion with outdated materials. It took us weeks of trial and error before discovering new methods through hidden tutorials and official documentation."

"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."

"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."

"It should be more flexible, integration-wise."

"The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings."

"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."

"It does not autoscale. Because if you do keep it manually when you add a note to the cluster and then you register it, then it is scalable, but the fact that you have to go and do it, I think, makes it, again, a bit of some operational overhead when managing the cluster."

More Amazon MSK cons

"I would improve the dashboard features as they are not very user-friendly."

"Spring Cloud Data Flow is not an easy-to-use tool, so improvements are required."

"On the tool's online discussion forums, you may get stuck with an issue, making it an area where improvements are required."

"Some of the features, like the monitoring tools, are not very mature and are still evolving."

"The solution's community support could be improved."

"The configurations could be better. Some configurations are a little bit time-consuming in terms of trying to understand using the Spring Cloud documentation."

"Spring Cloud Data Flow could improve the user interface. We can drag and drop in the application for the configuration and settings, and deploy it right from the UI, without having to run a CI/CD pipeline. However, that does not work with Kubernetes, it only works when we are working with jars as the Spring Cloud Data Flow applications."

"There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or refreshing the dashboard."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."

"When you create a complete enterprise-driven architecture that is deployable on an enterprise scale, I would say that the prices of Amazon MSK and Confluent Platform become comparable."

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."

"If you want support from Spring Cloud Data Flow there is a fee. The Spring Framework is open-source and this is a free solution."

"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."

"The solution provides value for money, and we are currently using its community edition."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

17%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MSK?

Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?

I'm not sure exactly what benefit we have because we are using multiple AWS tools. We have AWS DMS, which is also the same as Amazon MSK, and we have Fivetran, which is a third-party website provid...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?

We are currently using Amazon MSK to transfer data from our PostgreSQL database to our DynamoDB, acting as a mediator between those two databases for migration purposes. Our data is in an on-premis...

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What needs improvement with Spring Cloud Data Flow?

There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or r...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Spring Cloud Data Flow?

We had a project for content management, which involved multiple applications each handling content ingestion, transformation, enrichment, and storage for different customers independently. We want...

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What advice do you have for others considering Spring Cloud Data Flow?

I would definitely recommend Spring Cloud Data Flow. It requires minimal additional effort or time to understand how it works, and even non-specialists can use it effectively with its friendly docu...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Google Cloud Dataflow vs Amazon MSK

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Amazon MSK

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Apache Spark Streaming vs Spring Cloud Data Flow

Compared 6% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Spring Cloud Data Flow

Compared 6% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Spring Cloud Data Flow

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK

July 2025

Download Amazon MSK product report

Buyer's Guide

Spring Cloud Data Flow

July 2025

Download Spring Cloud Data Flow product report

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

No data available

Overview

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service that enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Amazon MSK provides the control-plane operations, such as those for creating, updating, and deleting clusters.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Spring Cloud Data Flow is a toolkit for building data integration and real-time data processing pipelines.
Pipelines consist of Spring Boot apps, built using the Spring Cloud Stream or Spring Cloud Task microservice frameworks. This makes Spring Cloud Data Flow suitable for a range of data processing use cases, from import/export to event streaming and predictive analytics. Use Spring Cloud Data Flow to connect your Enterprise to the Internet of Anything—mobile devices, sensors, wearables, automobiles, and more.

VMware

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow

July 2025

Free Report: Amazon MSK vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow

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