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Apache Kafka vs Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.2
Apache Kafka offers ROI through scalability, cost reduction, time savings, customization, and valuable insights, despite some challenges.
Sentiment score
6.9
Oracle Data Integrator offers strong ROI through automation and efficiency, with positive feedback on stability and cloud enhancements.
I can say we have noticed a strong return on investment largely due to improved scalability and reduced operational friction in asynchronous workflows.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.9
Apache Kafka primarily depends on an active open-source community for support, complemented by in-house expertise and optional paid services.
Sentiment score
5.8
ODI customer support solves issues effectively, yet users face response delays, communication challenges, especially in multi-technology integrations.
Practically, the biggest support channels are its community ecosystem, documentation, GitHub discussions, and engineering forums.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
The Apache community provides support for the open-source version.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
There is plenty of community support available online.
I can get solutions quickly, and any tickets I submit to Oracle are responded to and resolved rapidly.
The technical support of Oracle is very good; they support the Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) solution effectively.
Head of Data Services – Services Partner at 3 As Technologies
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Apache Kafka offers scalable solutions with Kubernetes, efficiently handling large data and users across industries, especially finance.
Sentiment score
7.6
Oracle Data Integrator is scalable and adaptable, handling large projects effectively, though resource demands may pose challenges.
Customers have not faced issues with user growth or data streaming needs.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
For traffic spikes, Apache Kafka naturally helps by buffering events, allowing consumers to catch up instead of immediately overwhelming downstream services.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
I need to enable my solution with high availability and scalability.
Data Architect at Ascendion
The scalability and the ability to handle multiple workloads of several parallel ETL jobs could use improvement.
Head of Data Services – Services Partner at 3 As Technologies
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Apache Kafka is stable and reliable, efficiently handling high data volumes with minimal issues and high user satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.4
Oracle Data Integrator shows strong stability improvements, with rare issues, efficient management of large volumes, and occasional integration challenges.
Testing changes in lower environments before production rollout and verifying replication health and cluster stability is essential.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Apache Kafka is stable.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
This feature of Apache Kafka has helped enhance our system stability when handling high volume data.
DevOps Engineer
In terms of performance stability, I have not experienced any downtimes, crashes, or performance issues with the Oracle Data Integrator (ODI).
Head of Data Services – Services Partner at 3 As Technologies
 

Room For Improvement

Kafka needs improvements in duplicate management, UI, troubleshooting, cloud integration, messaging control, ZooKeeper dependency, and management tools.
ODI needs better UI performance, tool compatibility, GitHub integration, error handling, real-time AI features, pricing, and external version control.
The performance angle is critical, and while it works in milliseconds, the goal is to move towards microseconds.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Running and maintaining an Apache Kafka cluster at scale involves handling partitions, replications, retention policies, rebalancing, and monitoring, which requires strong expertise.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Apache Kafka groups could introduce themes or profiles of configuration to help manage this complexity without needing expertise.
Senior Principal Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
If I use a source system like Oracle and a target system like Teradata, ODI will still run, but it struggles a bit with different infrastructures.
It would be excellent not to have to go into different areas to perform different activities but rather have a user-defined interface where we can configure a job, run it, monitor it, link packages, and link subprocesses all in one frame.
Head of Data Services – Services Partner at 3 As Technologies
Adding AI capabilities would make Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) even better.
Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Apache Kafka is open-source and affordable, but managed services and support can incur additional costs.
Oracle Data Integrator pricing varies; costs are influenced by licensing complexity, with potential savings through discounts and bundled solutions.
From a price perspective, if you are asking about Apache Kafka, I would rate it a nine.
Senior Principal Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
The open-source version of Apache Kafka results in minimal costs, mainly linked to accessing documentation and limited support.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Its pricing is reasonable.
ODI is cheaper compared to Informatica PowerCenter and IBM DataStage.
The pricing aspect of Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is reasonable; it brings significant value to the table.
Head of Data Services – Services Partner at 3 As Technologies
 

Valuable Features

Apache Kafka provides scalable, fault-tolerant, real-time data streaming for reliable message processing and integration across platforms with open-source flexibility.
Oracle Data Integrator optimizes EL-T processing with flexible integration, supporting diverse technologies and enhancing data management efficiency.
Apache Kafka is effective when dealing with large volumes of data flowing at high speeds, requiring real-time processing.
Apache Kafka is particularly valuable for managing high levels of transactions.
Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA
Regarding durability and reliability, messages are persisted, so temporary consumer failures do not automatically lead to data loss, which is valuable in financial workflows where losing events is unacceptable.
Senior Software Developer at NIT
The main benefits that Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) brings to the table include data quality, data completeness functionality, metadata management, and the reverse engineering feature, which allows integrating the metadata of diversified data sources with a single click.
Head of Data Services – Services Partner at 3 As Technologies
Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is powerful and strong if my system uses Oracle components for environments like OLTP, enterprise data warehouse, or data marts.
Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)'s ELT architecture has helped optimize my data movement and transformation significantly.
Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Apache Kafka
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Apache Kafka and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Apache Kafka is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 3.9%, up 3.0% compared to last year.
Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 2.5% mindshare, down 4.4% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Kafka3.9%
Apache Flink8.2%
Databricks7.9%
Other80.0%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)2.5%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)3.7%
SSIS3.6%
Other90.2%
Data Integration
 

Q&A Highlights

RS
Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Sep 09, 2021
 

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.
Hafiz Mannan - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Services – Services Partner at 3 As Technologies
Facilitates complex data integration with ease and flexibility
It would be great if ODI could link the designer, mapping, and workflows in a more simplified manner, maybe in one combined interface. It would be excellent not to have to go into different areas to perform different activities but rather have a user-defined interface where we can configure a job, run it, monitor it, link packages, and link subprocesses all in one frame instead of having the designer separately, mapping separately, and monitoring and session management separately. With respect to data quality challenges, it would be great to give an option to fix data quality issues based on AI. Integrating AI with ODI that provides recommendations on how to fix those data quality issues after analyzing and profiling business data would be excellent. One of the main disadvantages of the Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is that it sometimes takes a lot of resources when handling multiple jobs. The scalability and the ability to handle multiple workloads of several parallel ETL jobs could use improvement, and certain parallel threads should be added along with the ability to configure multiple jobs from the same data directory structure.
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Comparison Review

it_user99375 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Mar 31, 2014
Oracle GoldenGate vs. Oracle Active Dataguard
As an Oracle DBA, while working upon high availability of your database you may stumble upon various Oracle strategic capabilities that fall into categories of Oracle Replication. Oracle provides various technologies for replication like GoldenGate, streams, and Active Dataguard. Replication…
 

Answers from the Community

RS
Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Sep 9, 2021
Sep 9, 2021
There are two products I know about * TimeXtender : Microsoft based, Transformation logic is quiet good and can easily be extended with T-SQL , Has a semantic layer that generates metat data for cubes . price approx 40K$, works with tables . Attunity (Bought by Qlik) : technology agnostic , nice web interface , expensive > 100K€. Works with transaction logs There are many other pure ETL ...
2 out of 12 answers
SS
CEO / Owner with 51-200 employees
Apr 6, 2020
We usually use Talend. Look here: https://community.talend.com/t5/Design-and-Development/The-way-from-OLTP-to-OLAP/td-p/116719
RS
Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Apr 7, 2020
Thanks Stefan !!! May I know if Talend is opensource /free ? It is available in all 3 editions - basic , standard end enterprise? it is capable to read data from all heterogeneous system like various types of data bases and files etc..?
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise51
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise44
 

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's the difference between Oracle Integration Cloud Service and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)?
Oracle Integration Cloud Service has a fairly easy initial setup, and Oracle offers initial support and guidance for those who might find the setup to be challenging. There are complications that c...
What do you like most about Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)?
In comparison with other products of the same range, licensing mode is really attractive, no need to license according technology/topology to be used and an incredible Versatility to build any Data...
 

Also Known As

No data available
ODI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
Griffith University, Kansas City Power & Light, Keste, Raymond James Financial, Valdosta State University
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