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Apache Kafka vs Cloudera DataFlow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Apache Kafka
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudera DataFlow
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
19th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Kafka is 3.9%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudera DataFlow is 2.0%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Kafka3.9%
Cloudera DataFlow2.0%
Other94.1%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Event-driven workflows have improved payment processing and reduced latency across services
One area for improvement in Apache Kafka is operational complexity. Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise. Debugging and observability can be complex in large systems, as troubleshooting issues such as consumer lag, offset management problems, or uneven partition distribution can become challenging. The learning curve is relatively steep, requiring a good understanding of concepts such as partition, consumer group, offset commit, and delivery guarantees to avoid subtle production issues. One area where Apache Kafka could improve is the developer experience around debugging and tracing events end to end. In distributed systems, when an event passes through multiple topics and consumer services, troubleshooting can become time-consuming. Better built-in observability for tracing event flows across services would be very useful.
Mohamed-Saied - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Architect at Teradata Corporation
Efficient data integration and workflow scheduling elevate project performance
Cloudera DataFlow is used as an ETL or ELT solution within Cloudera's data pipeline. Our organization heavily relies on it for data ingestion, transformation, and warehousing. It is also used daily for operational tasks, and it integrates well within Cloudera's ecosystem for high performance and…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In my view, valuable features relate to microservices architecture and working on KStream and KSQL DB as a microservices event bus."
"The most valuable feature is the performance."
"The solution has allowed us to take the use cases provided by another communication tool and resolve those issues."
"The most valuable feature of Apache Kafka is Kafka Connect."
"Kafka is scalable. It can manage a high volume of data from many sources."
"All the features of Apache Kafka are valuable, I cannot single out one feature."
"For example, when you want to send a message to inform all your clients about a new feature, you can publish that message to a single topic in Apache Kafka. This allows all clients subscribed to that topic to receive the message. On the other hand, if you need to send billing information to a specific customer, you can publish that message on a topic dedicated to that customer. This message can then be sent as an SMS to the customer, allowing them to view it on their mobile device."
"It's a high-performance distributed system."
"The most effective features are data management and analytics."
"Cloudera DataFlow is fully compatible with Cloudera's ecosystem and offers high efficiency through native connectors for various ecosystems."
"This solution is very scalable and robust."
"DataFlow's performance is okay."
"The initial setup was not so difficult"
 

Cons

"It’s a trial-and-error process with no one-size-fits-all solution. Issues may arise until it’s appropriately tuned."
"GUI for Kafka infrastructure monitoring and deployment"
"An area for improvement would be growth."
"Confluent has improved aspects like documentation and cloud support, yet Kafka's reliance on older architectures like ZooKeeper in previous versions is a limitation."
"Kafka is complex and there is a little bit of a learning curve."
"Scalability may cause issues in the product if my nodes are full with multiple sources and delivery is slowing down."
"When we have thousands of topics, it is hard to visualize."
"When compared to other commercial competitors, Kafka doesn't have the ability to scale down, the elasticity is lacking in the product."
"Cloudera DataFlow's UI interface could be enhanced significantly. Memory handling can also be improved to be better than it is today."
"It's an outdated legacy product that doesn't meet the needs of modern data analysts and scientists."
"It is not easy to use the R language. Though I don't know if it's possible, I believe it is possible, but it is not the best language for machine learning."
"Although their workflow is pretty neat, it still requires a lot of transformation coding; especially when it comes to Python and other demanding programming languages."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Kafka is more reasonably priced than IBM MQ."
"Running a Kafka cluster can be expensive, especially if you need to scale it up to handle large amounts of data."
"It is approximately $600,000 USD."
"Apache Kafka is an open-sourced solution. There are fees if you want the support, and I would recommend it for enterprises. There are annual subscriptions available."
"Licensing issues are not applicable. Apache licensing makes it simple with almost zero cost for the software itself."
"I would not subscribe to the Confluent platform, but rather stay on the free open source version. The extra cost wasn't justified."
"The price of Apache Kafka is good."
"We are using the free version of Apache Kafka."
"DataFlow isn't expensive, but its value for money isn't great."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise51
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?
Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?
From the AWS perspective, the price is on the higher side. However, if you go for Apache Kafka, it is low. From a price perspective, if you are asking about Apache Kafka, I would rate it a nine.
What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is abundant with features which only an expert-level person will be able to manage due to the high volume and high concurrent expectations. Apache Kafka groups could introduce themes o...
What needs improvement with Cloudera DataFlow?
Cloudera DataFlow's UI interface could be enhanced significantly. Memory handling can also be improved to be better than it is today.
What is your primary use case for Cloudera DataFlow?
Cloudera DataFlow is used as an ETL or ELT solution within Cloudera's data pipeline. Our organization heavily relies on it for data ingestion, transformation, and warehousing. It is also used daily...
What advice do you have for others considering Cloudera DataFlow?
Cloudera DataFlow is fully compatible with Cloudera's ecosystem and offers high efficiency through native connectors for various ecosystems. However, the learning curve is high, and there is a shor...
 

Also Known As

No data available
CDF, Hortonworks DataFlow, HDF
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
Clearsense
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Kafka vs. Cloudera DataFlow and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,495 professionals have used our research since 2012.