IBM Cloud Pak for Integration vs StreamSets comparison

"It is a stable solution."

"The most valuable aspect of the Cloud Pak, in general, is the flexibility that you have to use the product."

"Cloud Pak for Integration is definitely scalable. That is the most important criteria."

"Redirection is a key feature. It helps in managing multiple microservices by centralizing control and access."

"The most preferable aspect would be the elimination of the command, which was a significant improvement. In the past, it was a challenge, but now we can proceed smoothly with the implementation of our policies and everything is managed through JCP. It's still among the positive aspects, and it's a valuable feature."

"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."

"In StreamSets, everything is in one place."

"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."

"It is really easy to set up and the interface is easy to use."

"Also, the intuitive canvas for designing all the streams in the pipeline, along with the simplicity of the entire product are very big pluses for me. The software is very simple and straightforward. That is something that is needed right now."

"The Ease of configuration for pipes is amazing. It has a lot of connectors. Mainly, we can do everything with the data in the pipe. I really like the graphical interface too"

"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."

"One of the things I like is the data pipelines. They have a very good design. Implementing pipelines is very straightforward. It doesn't require any technical skill."

"Enterprise bots are needed to balance products like Kafka and Confluent."

"The initial setup is not easy."

"Setting up Cloud Pak for Integration is relatively complex. It's not as easy because it has not yet been fully integrated. You still have some products that are still not containerized, so you still have to run them on a dedicated VM."

"Its queuing and messaging features need improvement."

"The pricing can be improved."

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

"The execution engine could be improved. When I was at their session, they were using some obscure platform to run. There is a controller, which controls what happens on that, but you should be able to easily do this at any of the cloud services, such as Google Cloud. You shouldn't have any issues in terms of how to run it with their online development platform or design platform, basically their execution engine. There are issues with that."

"If you use JDBC Lookup, for example, it generally takes a long time to process data."

"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. That would be a really good thing that we could use immediately. For example, if you have 100 tables in SQL Server or Oracle, then you could just point it to the schema or the 100 tables and ingestion information. However, you can't do that in SAP HANA since StreamSets currently is lacking in this. They do not have a multi-table feature for SAP HANA. Therefore, a multi-table origin for SAP HANA would be helpful."

"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."

"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."

"One thing that I would like to add is the ability to manually enter data. The way the solution currently works is we don't have the option to manually change the data at any point in time. Being able to do that will allow us to do everything that we want to do with our data. Sometimes, we need to manually manipulate the data to make it more accurate in case our prior bifurcation filters are not good. If we have the option to manually enter the data or make the exact iterations on the data set, that would be a good thing."

"One area for improvement could be the cloud storage server speed, as we have faced some latency issues here and there."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The solution's pricing model is very flexible."

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

"StreamSets Data Collector is open source. One can utilize the StreamSets Data Collector, but the Control Hub is the main repository where all the jobs are present. Everything happens in Control Hub."

"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."

"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."

"StreamSets is an expensive solution."

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

"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 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."