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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
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (6th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Spark Streaming is 2.6%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 2.9%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

AbhishekGupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy integration, beneficial auto-scaling, and good open-sourced support community
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. Apache Spark Streaming does not have auto-tuning. A customer needs to invest a lot, in terms of management and maintenance.
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

"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."
"Apache Spark's capabilities for machine learning are quite extensive and can be used in a low-code way."
"Apache Spark Streaming has features like checkpointing and Streaming API that are useful."
"The solution is better than average and some of the valuable features include efficiency and stability."
"The solution is very stable and reliable."
"Spark Streaming is critical, quite stable, full-featured, and scalable."
"Apache Spark Streaming is versatile. You can use it for competitive intelligence, gathering data from competitors, or for internal tasks like monitoring workflows."
"Apache Spark Streaming's most valuable feature is near real-time analytics. The developers can build APIs easily for a code-steaming pipeline. The solutions have an ecosystem of integration with other stock services."
"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."
"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."
"In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator."
"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."
"Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data."
"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."
"Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40 plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days."
"The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."
 

Cons

"The cost and load-related optimizations are areas where the tool lacks and needs improvement."
"Integrating event-level streaming capabilities could be beneficial."
"We would like to have the ability to do arbitrary stateful functions in Python."
"We don't have enough experience to be judgmental about its flaws."
"The initial setup is quite complex."
"The debugging aspect could use some improvement."
"It was resource-intensive, even for small-scale applications."
"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."
"The deployment process is complex."
"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
"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?"
"For improvements, I would suggest increasing the max payload size to a limit of 100MB or more. The current max payload size is limited to 5MB."
"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."
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."
"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."
"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."
"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
35%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
We don't have enough experience to be judgmental about its flaws, as we've only used stable features like batch micro-batch. Integration poses no problem; however, I don't use some features and can...
What is your primary use case for Apache Spark Streaming?
We use Spark Streaming in a micro-batch region. It's not a full real-time system, but it offers high performance and low latency.
What do you like most about PubSub+ Event Broker?
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.
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively. Additionally, providing a comprehensive dashboard t...
 

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: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.