FME vs StreamSets comparison

Safe Software and IBM are both solutions in the Data Integration category. Safe Software is ranked #23 with an average rating of 7.5, while IBM is ranked #22 with an average rating of 9.0. Safe Software holds a 1.6% mindshare in DI, compared to IBM’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Safe Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

FME

Read 7 FME reviews

2,587 Views
2,018 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

StreamSets

Read 21 StreamSets reviews

2,599 Views
1,871 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

FME

StreamSets

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

FME and StreamSets are competing in the data integration platform category. StreamSets appears to have the upper hand due to its user-friendly features and intuitive setup process.

Features: FME provides extensive format support and powerful transformation capabilities and integrates well with various systems. StreamSets is notable for its real-time data ingestion, advanced real-time analytics, and a broad range of data pipeline features with minimal coding.

Room for Improvement: FME could improve its user interface intuitiveness and simplify its learning curve for new users. It also needs enhancements in customer engagement and support services. StreamSets would benefit from faster processing for large data volumes, more robust handling of data drift, and improvements in portal load times.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: FME has a robust deployment process that may be complex, while StreamSets offers a straightforward deployment process with extensive onboarding support and better customer engagement.

Pricing and ROI: FME demands a higher initial investment but promises significant long-term ROI due to its versatility. In contrast, StreamSets offers lower initial costs with quicker time-to-value and cost efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed FME vs. StreamSets Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

FME vs. StreamSets

September 2025

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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

FME

Ranking in Data Integration

23rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

StreamSets

Ranking in Data Integration

22nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of FME is 1.6%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StreamSets is 1.5%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
StreamSets	1.5%
FME	1.6%
Other	96.9%

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Alan Bloor

Geographic Information System Developer at Public Sector

Great for handling large volumes of data, but it is priced a bit high

When I do coding, I think about every single function. Some of these functions can be very elementary, like doing a substring or some capitalization. But FME removes all that coding because it's a transformer, so the time to develop an application to get to a point where you're producing results is decreased massively. It used to take weeks and months to develop software, and now I can use something like FME, and within one day, we get results. We can look at and validate data. We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else.

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Ved Prakash Yadav

Senior Data Platform Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Useful for data transformation and helps with column encryption

We use various tools and alerting systems to notify us of pipeline errors or failures. StreamSets supports data governance and compliance by allowing us to encrypt incoming data based on specified rules. We can easily encrypt columns by providing the column name and hash key. If you're considering using StreamSets for the first time, I would advise first understanding why you want to use it and how it will benefit you. If you're dealing with change tracking or handling large amounts of data, it could be cost-effective compared to services like Amazon. It's easy to schedule and manage tasks with the tool, and you can enhance your skills as an ETL developer. You can easily migrate traditional pipelines built on platforms like Informatica or Talend to StreamSets. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"FME is spatially aware and understands how to deal with the conversion of spatial objects and their attributes."

"The most valuable feature of FME is the graphical user interface. There is nothing better. It is very easy to debug because you can see all steps where there are failures. Overall the software is easy to optimize a process."

"From my reseller perspective, the best features in FME are the ease of operation and the fact that it works."

"It has standard plug-ins available for different data sources."

"We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else."

"All spatial features are unrivaled, and the possibility to execute them based on a scheduled trigger, manual, e-mail, Websocket, tweet, file/directory change or virtually any trigger is most valuable."

"It has a very friendly user interface. You don't need to use a lot of code. For us that's the most important aspect about it. Also, it has a lot of connectors and few forms. It has a strong facial aspect. It can do a lot of facial analysis."

"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."

"What I love the most is that StreamSets is very light. It's a containerized application. It's easy to use with Docker. If you are a large organization, it's very easy to use Kubernetes."

"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 ability to have a good bifurcation rate and fewer mistakes is valuable."

"The most valuable feature is the pipelines because they enable us to pull in and push out data from different sources and to manipulate and clean things up within them."

"I really appreciate the numerous ready connectors available on both the source and target sides, the support for various media file formats, and the ease of configuring and managing pipelines centrally."

"The entire user interface is very simple and the simplicity of creating pipelines is something that I like very much about it. The design experience is very smooth."

More StreamSets pros

Cons

"To get a higher rating, it would have to improve the price and the associated scalability. These are the main issues."

"Improvements could be made to mapping presentations."

"The one thing that always appears in the community is the ability to make really easy loops to loop through data efficiently. That needs to be added at some point."

"FME can improve the geographical transformation. I've had some problems with the geographical transformations, but it's probably mostly because I'm not the most skilled geographer in-house. The solution requires some in-depth knowledge to perform some functions."

"FME's price needs improvement for the African market."

"We are looking at the possibility of using Glue instead of FME, using the native AWS product."

"The monitoring visualization is not that user-friendly. It should include other features to visualize things, like how many records were streamed from a source to a destination on a particular date."

"Visualization and monitoring need to be improved and refined."

"In terms of the product, I don't think there is any room for improvement because it is very good. One small area of improvement that is very much needed is on the knowledge base side. Sometimes, it is not very clear how to set up a certain process or a certain node for a person who's using the platform for the first time."

"StreamSet works great for batch processing but we are looking for something that is more real-time. We need latency in numbers below milliseconds."

"The documentation is inadequate and has room for improvement because the technical support does not regularly update their documentation or the knowledge base."

"I would like to see it integrate with other kinds of platforms, other than Java. We're going to have a lot of applications using .NET and other languages or frameworks. StreamSets is very helpful for the old Java platform but it's hard to integrate with the other platforms and frameworks."

"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 software is very good overall. Areas for improvement are the error logging and the version history. I would like to see better, more detailed error logging information."

More StreamSets cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's price is reasonable."

"We used the standard licensing for our use of FME. The cost was approximately €15,000 annually. We always welcome less expensive solutions, if the solution could be less expensive it would be helpful."

"FME Server used to cost £10,000; now it can cost over £100,000."

"It has a CPU core-based licensing, which works for us and is quite good."

"The overall cost is very flexible so it is not a burden for our organization... However, the cost should be improved. For small and mid-size organizations it might be a challenge."

"We are running the community version right now, which can be used free of charge."

"StreamSets is an expensive solution."

"The pricing is too fixed. It should be based on how much data you need to process. Some businesses are not so big that they process a lot of data."

"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."

"It's not so favorable for small companies."

"There are two editions, Professional and Enterprise, and there is a free trial. We're using the Professional edition and it is competitively priced."

More StreamSets pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

34%

Energy/Utilities Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FME?

We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FME?

The pricing is really bad. Last year, they rebranded the whole pricing structure. It used to be moderately priced at about £400 per user per year. Now they've changed the whole thing, and it's expe...

See all answers

What needs improvement with FME?

I haven't had any input or requirements from any customers that are not currently covered, so I don't have any additional needs that were identified or raised to me. Regarding pricing, with the mod...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for StreamSets?

We are using StreamSets for batch loading.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 9% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs FME

Compared 7% of the time

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Informatica PowerCenter vs StreamSets

Compared 11% of the time

webMethods.io vs StreamSets

Compared 8% of the time

IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs StreamSets

Compared 8% of the time

Qlik Replicate vs StreamSets

Compared 7% of the time

Oracle GoldenGate vs StreamSets

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

FME

October 2025

Download FME product report

Buyer's Guide

StreamSets

September 2025

Download StreamSets product report

Overview

FME is the data integration platform with the best support for spatial data. Run workflows on the desktop or deploy them in a server or cloud environment.

Safe Software

StreamSets is a data integration platform that enables organizations to efficiently move and process data across various systems. It offers a user-friendly interface for designing, deploying, and managing data pipelines, allowing users to easily connect to various data sources and destinations. StreamSets also provides real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities, ensuring that data is flowing smoothly and any issues are quickly addressed.

IBM

Sample Customers

Shell, US Department of Commerce, PG&E, BC Hydro, City of Vancouver, Enel, Iowa DoT, San Antonio Water System

Availity, BT Group, Humana, Deluxe, GSK, RingCentral, IBM, Shell, SamTrans, State of Ohio, TalentFulfilled, TechBridge

Buyer's Guide

FME vs. StreamSets

September 2025

Free Report: FME vs. StreamSets

Find out what your peers are saying about FME vs. StreamSets and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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