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Azure Data Factory vs Spring Cloud Data Flow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 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

Azure Data Factory
Ranking in Data Integration
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (3rd)
Spring Cloud Data Flow
Ranking in Data Integration
24th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Azure Data Factory is 8.9%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Cloud Data Flow is 1.1%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Joy Maitra - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless data pipeline creation with good analytics and and thorough monitoring
Azure Data Factory is a low code, no code platform, which is helpful. It provides many prebuilt functionalities that assist in building data pipelines. Also, it facilitates easy transformation with all required functionalities for analytics. Furthermore, it connects to different sources out-of-the-box, making integration much easier. The monitoring is very thorough, though a more readable version would be appreciable.
NitinGoyal - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a plug-and-play model and provides good robustness and scalability
The solution's community support could be improved. I don't know why the Spring Cloud Data Flow community is not very strong. Community support is very limited whenever you face any problem or are stuck somewhere. I'm not sure whether it has improved in the last six months because this pipeline was set up almost two years ago. I struggled with that a lot. For example, there was limited support whenever I got an exception and sought help from Stack Overflow or different forums. Interacting with Kubernetes needs a few certificates. You need to define all the certificates within your application. With the help of those certificates, your Java application or Spring Cloud Data Flow can interact with Kubernetes. I faced a lot of hurdles while placing those certificates. Despite following the official documentation to define all the replicas, readiness, and liveliness probes within the Spring Cloud Data Flow application, it was not working. So, I had to troubleshoot while digging in and debugging the internals of Spring Cloud Data Flow at that time. It was just a configuration mismatch, and I was doing nothing weird. There was a small spelling difference between how Spring Cloud Data Flow was expecting it and how I passed it. I was just following the official documentation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For me, it was that there are dedicated connectors for different targets or sources, different data sources. For example, there is direct connector to Salesforce, Oracle Service Cloud, etcetera, and that was really helpful."
"Data Factory's best features include its data source connections, GUI for building data pipelines, and target loading within Azure."
"UI is easy to navigate and I can retrieve VTL code without knowing in-depth coding languages."
"The user interface is very good. It makes me feel very comfortable when I am using the tool."
"I think it makes it very easy to understand what data flow is and so on. You can leverage the user interface to do the different data flows, and it's great. I like it a lot."
"It makes it easy to collect data from different sources."
"ADF is another ETL tool similar to Informatica that can transform data or copy it from on-prem to the cloud or vice versa. Once we have the data, we can apply various transformations to it and schedule our pipeline according to our business needs. ADF integrates with Databricks. We can call our Databricks notebooks and schedule them via ADF."
"The most valuable feature of Azure Data Factory is that it has a good combination of flexibility, fine-tuning, automation, and good monitoring."
"The ease of deployment on Kubernetes, the seamless integration for orchestration of various pipelines, and the visual dashboard that simplifies operations even for non-specialists such as quality analysts."
"The dashboards in Spring Cloud Dataflow are quite valuable."
"The solution's most valuable feature is that it allows us to use different batch data sources, retrieve the data, and then do the data processing, after which we can convert and store it in the target."
"There are a lot of options in Spring Cloud. It's flexible in terms of how we can use it. It's a full infrastructure."
"The best thing I like about Spring Cloud Data Flow is its plug-and-play model."
"The most valuable feature is real-time streaming."
"The most valuable features of Spring Cloud Data Flow are the simple programming model, integration, dependency Injection, and ability to do any injection. Additionally, auto-configuration is another important feature because we don't have to configure the database and or set up the boilerplate in the database in every project. The composability is good, we can create small workloads and compose them in any way we like."
"The product is very user-friendly."
 

Cons

"The solution can be improved by decreasing the warmup time which currently can take up to five minutes."
"There's no Oracle connector if you want to do transformation using data flow activity, so Azure Data Factory needs more connectors for data flow transformation."
"There is always room to improve. There should be good examples of use that, of course, customers aren't always willing to share. It is Catch-22. It would help the user base if everybody had really good examples of deployments that worked, but when you ask people to put out their good deployments, which also includes me, you usually got, "No, I'm not going to do that." They don't have enough good examples. Microsoft probably just needs to pay one of their partners to build 20 or 30 examples of functional Data Factories and then share them as a user base."
"The solution needs to be more connectable to its own services."
"I have encountered a problem with the integration with third-party solutions, particularly with SAP."
"If the user interface was more user friendly and there was better error feedback, it would be helpful."
"Integration of data lineage would be a nice feature in terms of DevOps integration. It would make implementation for a company much easier. I'm not sure if that's already available or not. However, that would be a great feature to add if it isn't already there."
"Data Factory's cost is too high."
"The configurations could be better. Some configurations are a little bit time-consuming in terms of trying to understand using the Spring Cloud documentation."
"On the tool's online discussion forums, you may get stuck with an issue, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Spring Cloud Data Flow is not an easy-to-use tool, so improvements are required."
"Spring Cloud Data Flow could improve the user interface. We can drag and drop in the application for the configuration and settings, and deploy it right from the UI, without having to run a CI/CD pipeline. However, that does not work with Kubernetes, it only works when we are working with jars as the Spring Cloud Data Flow applications."
"There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or refreshing the dashboard."
"The solution's community support could be improved."
"Some of the features, like the monitoring tools, are not very mature and are still evolving."
"I would improve the dashboard features as they are not very user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would not say that this product is overly expensive."
"The solution is cheap."
"For our use case, it is not expensive. We take into the picture everything: resources, learning curve, and maintenance."
"I don't see a cost; it appears to be included in general support."
"ADF is cheaper compared to AWS."
"The pricing is a bit on the higher end."
"The price you pay is determined by how much you use it."
"Our licensing fees are approximately 15,000 ($150 USD) per month."
"If you want support from Spring Cloud Data Flow there is a fee. The Spring Framework is open-source and this is a free solution."
"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."
"The solution provides value for money, and we are currently using its community edition."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
18%
Retailer
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?
AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.
How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica PowerCenter?
Azure Data Factory is flexible, modular, and works well. In terms of cost, it is not too pricey. It offers the stability and reliability I am looking for, good scalability, and is easy to set up an...
How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica Cloud Data Integration?
Azure Data Factory is a solid product offering many transformation functions; It has pre-load and post-load transformations, allowing users to apply transformations either in code by using Power Q...
What needs improvement with Spring Cloud Data Flow?
There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or r...
What is your primary use case for Spring Cloud Data Flow?
We had a project for content management, which involved multiple applications each handling content ingestion, transformation, enrichment, and storage for different customers independently. We want...
What advice do you have for others considering Spring Cloud Data Flow?
I would definitely recommend Spring Cloud Data Flow. It requires minimal additional effort or time to understand how it works, and even non-specialists can use it effectively with its friendly docu...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Adobe 2. BMW 3. Coca-Cola 4. General Electric 5. Johnson & Johnson 6. LinkedIn 7. Mastercard 8. Nestle 9. Pfizer 10. Samsung 11. Siemens 12. Toyota 13. Unilever 14. Verizon 15. Walmart 16. Accenture 17. American Express 18. AT&T 19. Bank of America 20. Cisco 21. Deloitte 22. ExxonMobil 23. Ford 24. General Motors 25. IBM 26. JPMorgan Chase 27. Microsoft (Azure Data Factory is developed by Microsoft) 28. Oracle 29. Procter & Gamble 30. Salesforce 31. Shell 32. Visa
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Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Data Factory vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.