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Apache Spark Streaming vs PubSub+ Platform 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 Spark Streaming
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (8th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Spark Streaming is 3.6%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 3.0%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Apache Spark Streaming3.6%
PubSub+ Platform3.0%
Other93.4%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Himansu Jena - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient real-time data management and analysis with advanced features
There are various ways we can improve Apache Spark Streaming through best practices. The initial part requires attention to batch interval tuning, which helps small intervals in micro batches based on latency requirements and helps prevent back pressure. We can use data formats such as Parquet or ORC for storage that needs faster reads and leveraging feature predicate push-down optimizations. We can implement serialization which helps with any Kyro in terms of .NET or Java. We have boxing and unboxing serialization for XML and JSON for converting key-pair values stored in browser. We can also implement caching mechanisms for storing and recomputing multiple operations. We can use specified joins which help with smaller databases, and distributed joins can minimize users. We can implement project optimization memory for CPU efficiency, known as Tungsten. Additionally, load balancing, checkpointing, and schema evaluation are areas to consider based on performance and bottlenecks. We can use Bugzilla tools for tracking and Splunk to monitor the performance of process systems, utilization, and performance based on data frames or data sets.
BhanuChidigam - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs well, high availability, and helpful support
We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Apache Spark Streaming's integration with Anaconda and Miniconda with Python, I interact with databases using data frames or data sets in micro versions and create solutions based on business expectations for decision-making, logistic regression, linear regression, or machine learning which provides image or voice record and graphical data for improved accuracy."
"Apache Spark Streaming was straightforward in terms of maintenance. It was actively developed, and migrating from an older to a newer version was quite simple."
"The solution is very stable and reliable."
"As an open-source solution, using it is basically free."
"The solution is better than average and some of the valuable features include efficiency and stability."
"Apache Spark Streaming has features like checkpointing and Streaming API that are useful."
"By integrating Apache Spark Streaming, the data freshness rate, and latency have significantly improved from 24-hour batch processing to less than one minute, facilitating faster communication to downstream systems, aiding marketing campaigns."
"The platform’s most valuable feature for processing real-time data is its ability to handle continuous data streams."
"I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10."
"Some valuable features include reconnecting topics, placing queues, and direct connections to MongoDB. The platform provides a dashboard to monitor the status of messages, such as how many have been processed or delivered, which is helpful for tracking performance."
"The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live."
"The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."
"The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption."
"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."
"When we went to add another installation in our private cloud, it was easy. We received support from Solace and the install was seamless with no issues."
"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."
 

Cons

"When dealing with various data types including COBOL, Excel, JSON, video, audio, and MPG files, challenges can arise with incomplete or missing values."
"Integrating event-level streaming capabilities could be beneficial."
"One improvement I would expect is real-time processing instead of micro-batch or near real-time."
"In terms of improvement, the UI could be better."
"It was resource-intensive, even for small-scale applications."
"Monitoring is an area where they could definitely improve Apache Spark Streaming. When you have a streaming application, it generates numerous logs. After some time, the logs become meaningless because they're quite large and impossible to open."
"The service structure of Apache Spark Streaming can improve. There are a lot of issues with memory management and latency. There is no real-time analytics. We recommend it for the use cases where there is a five-second latency, but not for a millisecond, an IOT-based, or the detection anomaly-based. Flink as a service is much better."
"While it is reliable, there are some issues with Apache Spark Streaming as it is not 100% reliable."
"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."
"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."
"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."
"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."
"A challenge we currently have is Solace's ability to integrate with single sign-on in our Active Directory and other single sign-on tools and platforms that any company would have. It's important for the platforms to work. Typically, they support only LDAP-based connectivity to our SQL Servers."
"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building. A current workaround is using the message's header, where the business data can be put into this header and be used for a dynamic topic lookup. I want to see this in action when there are a couple of hundred cases live. E.g., how does it perform? From an administration perspective, is the ease of use there?"
"We've pointed out some things with the DMR piece, the event mesh, in edge cases where we could see a problem. Something like 99 percent of users wouldn't ever see this problem, but it has to do with if you get multiple bad clients sending data over a WAN, for example. That could then impact other clients."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."
"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."
"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive, or not cost-effective, and ten is cheap, I rate the price a seven."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."
"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."
"Having a free version is critical for our technology operations use case. This is primarily because our technology operations team is a cost center in our company. They are not profit drivers and having a free version for installation will probably meet our needs. Even for production, it'll support up to a 100,000 messages per second. I don't think in technology operations that we have that many events and alerts from our detection tools. Even if I have 20 or 30 event detection products out there, they're only going to publish the things which are critical or warnings. I don't think we'll ever reach a 100,000 messages per second."
"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Healthcare Company
6%
University
5%
Financial Services Firm
32%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache Spark Streaming?
Apache Spark Streaming is versatile. You can use it for competitive intelligence, gathering data from competitors, or for internal tasks like monitoring workflows.
What needs improvement with Apache Spark Streaming?
There are various ways we can improve Apache Spark Streaming through best practices. The initial part requires attention to batch interval tuning, which helps small intervals in micro batches based...
What is your primary use case for Apache Spark Streaming?
I use Apache Spark Streaming for GIS (Graphical Information System), satellite imaging processing, image processing, longitude, latitude, and predicting electricity, road, and transformations in th...
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was a...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
My typical use case for the PubSub+ Platform is as an event-driven solution for communication between two components.
What advice do you have for others considering PubSub+ Event Broker?
I have experience working with Kafka, PubSub+ Platform, and IBM MQ, all three of them. We are customers, meaning my company uses Solace. We use it and customize it based on our needs. Based on my e...
 

Also Known As

Spark Streaming
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, eBay Inc.
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark Streaming vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
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