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Apache NiFi vs Apache Spark comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

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 NiFi
Ranking in Compute Service
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache Spark
Ranking in Compute Service
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (2nd), Java Frameworks (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Apache NiFi is 9.3%, up from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Spark is 11.4%, up from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Apache Spark11.4%
Apache NiFi9.3%
Other79.3%
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

Bharghava Raghavendra Beesa - PeerSpot reviewer
The tool enables effective data transformation and integration
There are some areas for improvement, particularly with record-level tasks that take a bit of time. The quality of JSON data processing could be improved, as JSON workloads require manual conversions without a specific process. Enhancing features related to alerting would be helpful, including mobile alerts for pipeline issues. Integration with mobile devices for error alerts would simplify information delivery.
Omar Khaled - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowering data consolidation and fast decision-making with efficient big data processing
I can improve the organization's functions by taking less time to make decisions. To make the right decision, you need the right data, and a solution can provide this by hiring talent and employees who can consolidate data from different sources and organize it. Not all solutions can make this data fast enough to be used, except for solutions such as Apache Spark Structured Streaming. To make the right decision, you should have both accurate and fast data. Apache Spark itself is similar to the Python programming language. Python is a language with many libraries for mathematics and machine learning. Apache Spark is the solution, and within it, you have PySpark, which is the API for Apache Spark to write and run Python code. Within it, there are many APIs, including SQL APIs, allowing you to write SQL code within a Python function in Apache Spark. You can also use Apache Spark Structured Streaming and machine learning APIs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's an automated flow, where you can build a flow from source to destination, then do the transformation in between."
"The initial setup is very easy. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a ten out of ten, where one point is difficult, and ten points are easy."
"Visually, this is a good product."
"The most valuable feature has been the range of clients and the range of connectors that we could use."
"It is highly effective for handling real-time data by working with APIs for immediate and continuous data extraction."
"We can integrate the tool with other applications easily."
"The most valuable features of this solution are ease of use and implementation."
"The user interface is good and makes it easy to design very popular workflows."
"The processing time is very much improved over the data warehouse solution that we were using."
"The distribution of tasks, like the seamless map-reduce functionality, is quite impressive."
"There's a lot of functionality."
"The scalability has been the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The most valuable feature of Apache Spark is its flexibility."
"The deployment of the product is easy."
"The most significant advantage of Spark 3.0 is its support for DataFrame UDF Pandas UDF features."
"One of the key features is that Apache Spark is a distributed computing framework. You can help multiple slaves and distribute the workload between them."
 

Cons

"More features must be added to the product."
"There are some claims that NiFi is cloud-native but we have tested it, and it's not."
"The tool should incorporate more tutorials for advanced use cases. It has tutorials for simple use cases."
"There should be a better way to integrate a development environment with local tools."
"We run many jobs, and there are already large tables. When we do not control NiFi on time, all reports fail for the day. So it's pretty slow to control, and it has to be improved."
"The overall stability of this solution could be improved. In a future release, we would like to have access to more features that could be used in a parallel way. This would provide more freedom with processing."
"There is room for improvement in integration with SSO. For example, NiFi does not have any integration with SSO. And if I want to give some kind of rollback access control across the organization. That is not possible."
"The quality of JSON data processing could be improved, as JSON workloads require manual conversions without a specific process."
"It's not easy to install."
"It needs a new interface and a better way to get some data. In terms of writing our scripts, some processes could be faster."
"When using Spark, users may need to write their own parallelization logic, which requires additional effort and expertise."
"Stability in terms of API (things were difficult, when transitioning from RDD to DataFrames, then to DataSet)."
"For improvement, I think the tool could make things easier for people who aren't very technical. There's a significant learning curve, and I've seen organizations give up because of it. Making it quicker or easier for non-technical people would be beneficial."
"It should support more programming languages."
"Its UI can be better. Maintaining the history server is a little cumbersome, and it should be improved. I had issues while looking at the historical tags, which sometimes created problems. You have to separately create a history server and run it. Such things can be made easier. Instead of separately installing the history server, it can be made a part of the whole setup so that whenever you set it up, it becomes available."
"We've had problems using a Python process to try to access something in a large volume of data. It crashes if somebody gives me the wrong code because it cannot handle a large volume of data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an open-source solution."
"We use the free version of Apache NiFi."
"I used the tool's free version."
"The solution is open-source."
"Considering the product version used in my company, I feel that the tool is not costly since the product is available for free."
"The tool is an open-source product. If you're using the open-source Apache Spark, no fees are involved at any time. Charges only come into play when using it with other services like Databricks."
"It is an open-source platform. We do not pay for its subscription."
"It is an open-source solution, it is free of charge."
"Apache Spark is an expensive solution."
"Since we are using the Apache Spark version, not the data bricks version, it is an Apache license version, the support and resolution of the bug are actually late or delayed. The Apache license is free."
"They provide an open-source license for the on-premise version."
"Apache Spark is not too cheap. You have to pay for hardware and Cloudera licenses. Of course, there is a solution with open source without Cloudera."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Retailer
9%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise32
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache NiFi?
Apache NiFi is open-source and free. Its integration with systems like Cloudera can be expensive, but Apache NiFi itself presents the best pricing as a standalone tool.
What needs improvement with Apache NiFi?
The logging system of Apache NiFi needs improvement. It is difficult to debug compared to Airflow ( /products/apache-airflow-reviews ), where task details and issues are clear. With Apache NiFi, I ...
What do you like most about Apache Spark?
We use Spark to process data from different data sources.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Spark?
Apache Spark is open-source, so it doesn't incur any charges.
What needs improvement with Apache Spark?
Regarding Apache Spark, I have only used Apache Spark Structured Streaming, not the machine learning components. I am uncertain about specific improvements needed today. However, after five years, ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Macquarie Telecom Group, Dovestech, Slovak Telekom, Looker, Hastings Group
NASA JPL, UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, UC Santa Cruz, TripAdvisor, Taboola, Agile Lab, Art.com, Baidu, Alibaba Taobao, EURECOM, Hitachi Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache NiFi vs. Apache Spark and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
873,085 professionals have used our research since 2012.