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Census vs StreamSets 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Census
Ranking in Data Integration
38th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StreamSets
Ranking in Data Integration
25th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Census is 0.5%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StreamSets is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StreamSets1.2%
Census0.5%
Other98.3%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

JeanFrancois - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Accountant at Wells Fargo
Automation has transformed our data workflows and creates one trusted source across teams
Census offers excellent integration with popular tools including Salesforce. It can be set up easily and comes with great customer support. The easy setup stands out for me compared to other tools I have used because the support has been very helpful. I love their response time, as they are quick to resolve any issues that we have. Easy setup makes this tool much more user-friendly as it simplifies the process of synchronizing data between different systems. I also love the user interface, which is very easy to navigate and intuitive. This allows us to get up and running easily in minutes with little to no training. I appreciate that it is highly scalable and can integrate with various data warehouses like Redshift and S3, making it accessible to users without technical knowledge or engineers. Census has positively impacted my organization by being a great tool. We are able to respond to customers' account health more rapidly by synchronizing our data into the various customer account management tools. As mentioned, it is able to automate various tasks, enabling us to save a lot of time. It has also helped us minimize data silos while enabling the warehouse to be a single source of truth for data. Through automation, we have been able to save between forty and sixty percent in time and cost, thanks to the automation platform and automation capabilities.
SS
Enterprise Solutions Architect at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Enables effective batch loading with visual interface and enterprise support
One issue I observed with StreamSets is that the memory runs out quickly when processing large volumes of data. Because of this memory issue, we have to upgrade our EC2 boxes in the Amazon AWS infrastructure. I had to switch to a new EC2 box, even though the processor was not fully utilized. It would be beneficial if StreamSets addressed any potential memory leak issues to prevent unnecessary upgrades. Additionally, it would be a great enhancement if StreamSets could produce a lineage graph to visualize how the data has passed through the system.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Through automation, we have been able to save between forty and sixty percent in time and cost, thanks to the automation platform and automation capabilities."
"Based on delivery metrics and team feedback, the benefit is that the time to activate new use cases was reduced from weeks to days, engineering effort dedicated to reverse ETL pipelines decreased by sixty to seventy percent, maintenance overhead for custom integration was almost completely eliminated, and marketing and growth teams accelerated experimentation cycles significantly."
"StreamSets’ data drift resilience has reduced the time it takes us to fix data drift breakages, completing processes that previously took approximately an hour to an hour and a half with Hadoop in just 15 minutes and saving us around 45 minutes per data pipeline or table that we migrate."
"StreamSets Transformer is a good feature because it helps you when you are developing applications and when you don't want to write a lot of code. That is the best feature overall."
"StreamSets data drift feature gives us an alert upfront so we know that the data can be ingested. Whatever the schema or data type changes, it lands automatically into the data lake without any intervention from us, but then that information is crucial to fix for downstream pipelines, which process the data into models, like Tableau and Power BI models. This is actually very useful for us. We are already seeing benefits. Our pipelines used to break when there were data drift changes, then we needed to spend about a week fixing it. Right now, we are saving one to two weeks. Though, it depends on the complexity of the pipeline, we are definitely seeing a lot of time being saved."
"This product was a lot easier to use than the one we had before it, and it took us half an hour and we were set up and running it the first time."
"StreamSets’ data drift resilience has reduced the time it takes us to fix data drift breakages. For example, in our previous Hadoop scenario, when we were creating the Sqoop-based processes to move data from source to destinations, we were getting the job done. That took approximately an hour to an hour and a half when we did it with Hadoop. However, with the StreamSets, since it works on a data collector-based mechanism, it completes the same process in 15 minutes of time. Therefore, it has saved us around 45 minutes per data pipeline or table that we migrate. Thus, it reduced the data transfer, including the drift part, by 45 minutes."
"I have used Data Collector, Transformer, and Control Hub products from StreamSets. What I really like about these products is that they're very user-friendly. People who are not from a technological or core development background find it easy to get started and build data pipelines and connect to the databases. They would be comfortable like any technical person within a couple of weeks."
"The ETL capabilities are very useful for us. We extract and transform data from multiple data sources, into a single, consistent data store, and then we put it in our systems. We typically use it to connect our Apache Kafka with data lakes. That process is smooth and saves us a lot of time in our production systems."
"The most valuable would be the GUI platform that I saw. I first saw it at a special session that StreamSets provided towards the end of the summer. I saw the way you set it up and how you have different processes going on with your data. The design experience seemed to be pretty straightforward to me in terms of how you drag and drop these nodes and connect them with arrows."
 

Cons

"One area that may need improvement is that sometimes a custom setup is very difficult to configure."
"The areas for improvement are complex transformation logic because it must still be handled upstream in the warehouse, and cost predictability requires attention at high data volumes."
"Currently, we can only use the query to read data from SAP HANA. What we would like to see, as soon as possible, is the ability to read from multiple tables from SAP HANA."
"There are a few things that can be better."
"The design experience is the bane of our existence because their documentation is not the best. Even when they update their software, they don't publish the best information on how to update and change your pipeline configuration to make it conform to current best practices. We don't pay for the added support. We use the "freeware version." The user community, as well as the documentation they provide for the standard user, are difficult, at best."
"There aren't enough hands-on labs, and debugging is also an issue because it takes a lot of time. Logs are not that clear when you are debugging, and you can only select a single source for a pipeline."
"The logging mechanism could be improved. Now, it is a bit difficult to understand and filter the logs."
"One area for improvement could be the cloud storage server speed, as we have faced some latency issues here and there."
"The logging mechanism could be improved. If I am working on a pipeline, then create a job out of it and it is running, it will generate constant logs. So, the logging mechanism could be simplified. Now, it is a bit difficult to understand and filter the logs. It takes some time."
"We've seen a couple of cases where it appears to have a memory leak or a similar problem."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We use the free version. It's great for a public, free release. Our stance is that the paid support model is too expensive to get into. They should honestly reevaluate that."
"The pricing is affordable for any business."
"There are different versions of the product. One is the corporate license version, and the other one is the open-source or free version. I have been using the corporate license version, but they have recently launched a new open-source version so that anybody can create an account and use it. The licensing cost varies from customer to customer. I don't have a lot of input on that. It is taken care of by PMO, and they seem fine with its pricing model. It is being used enterprise-wide. They seem to have got a good deal for StreamSets."
"Its pricing is pretty much up to the mark. For smaller enterprises, it could be a big price to pay at the initial stage of operations, but the moment you have the Seed B or Seed C funding and you want to scale up your operations and aren't much worried about the funds, at that point in time, you would need a solution that could be scaled."
"We are running the community version right now, which can be used free of charge."
"It has a CPU core-based licensing, which works for us and is quite good."
"The licensing is expensive, and there are other costs involved too. I know from using the software that you have to buy new features whenever there are new updates, which I don't really like. But initially, it was very good."
"StreamSets is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Census?
Census has been performing very well overall. One area that may need improvement is that sometimes a custom setup is very difficult to configure. This was the case with our Intercom segment setup. ...
What is your primary use case for Census?
Census is a versatile data synchronizing solution that solves a wide range of data management problems for our business. With Census, we were able to reduce the sync time taken to transfer data fro...
What advice do you have for others considering Census?
I would rate Census an eight out of ten according to my experience. I feel it is not quite a ten because sometimes a custom setup is very difficult to configure. This was the case with our Intercom...
What do you like most about StreamSets?
The best thing about StreamSets is its plugins, which are very useful and work well with almost every data source. It's also easy to use, especially if you're comfortable with SQL. You can customiz...
What needs improvement with StreamSets?
One issue I observed with StreamSets is that the memory runs out quickly when processing large volumes of data. Because of this memory issue, we have to upgrade our EC2 boxes in the Amazon AWS infr...
What is your primary use case for StreamSets?
We are using StreamSets for batch loading.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Availity, BT Group, Humana, Deluxe, GSK, RingCentral, IBM, Shell, SamTrans, State of Ohio, TalentFulfilled, TechBridge
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Qlik and others in Data Integration. Updated: March 2026.
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