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IBM Cloud Pak for Integration 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

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
API Management (28th), Cloud Data Integration (20th)
StreamSets
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (24th)
 

Featured Reviews

Igor Khalitov - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner/Full Stack Software Engineer at Maraphonic, Inc.
Manages APIs and integrates microservices with redirection feature
IBM Cloud Pak for Integration includes monitoring capabilities to track the performance and health of your integrations. You can quickly roll back to a previous version if an issue arises. Additionally, it supports incremental deployments, allowing you to shift traffic to a new version of an API gradually. For example, you can start by directing 10% of traffic to the new version while the rest continue using the legacy version. If everything works as expected, you can gradually increase the traffic to the new version over time. IBM Cloud Pak for Integration has a client base that includes numerous organizations using AI and machine learning technologies. We leverage an open-source machine learning framework and integrate it with Kafka to help create and manage various products and data retrieval processes. For companies with private data, the framework first retrieves relevant data from a GitHub database, which is then combined with the final request before being sent to a language model like GPT. This ensures that the language model uses your specific data to generate responses. Kafka plays a key role by streaming real-time data from file systems and databases like Oracle and Microsoft SQL. This data is published to Kafka topics, then vectorized and used with artificial intelligence to enhance the overall process. It's like an old-fashioned approach. The best way is to redesign it with products such as Kafka. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
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

"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."
"Cloud Pak for Integration is definitely scalable. That is the most important criteria."
"It is a stable solution."
"Redirection is a key feature. It helps in managing multiple microservices by centralizing control and access."
"The most valuable aspect of the Cloud Pak, in general, is the flexibility that you have to use the product."
"In general, the solution works very, very well."
"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."
"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."
"For me, the most valuable features in StreamSets have to be the Data Collector and Control Hub, but especially the Data Collector. That feature is very elegant and seamlessly works with numerous source systems."
"StreamSets is the leader in the market."
"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."
"In StreamSets, everything is in one place."
"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 scheduling within the data engineering pipeline is very much appreciated, and it has a wide range of connectors for connecting to any data sources like SQL Server, AWS, Azure, etc. We have used it with Kafka, Hadoop, and Azure Data Factory Datasets. Connecting to these systems with StreamSets is very easy."
 

Cons

"What needs to be improved is the restriction that they have on the product."
"Its queuing and messaging features need improvement."
"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."
"Enterprise bots are needed to balance products like Kafka and Confluent."
"The pricing can be improved."
"The initial setup is not easy."
"If you use JDBC Lookup, for example, it generally takes a long time to process data."
"Visualization and monitoring need to be improved and refined."
"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."
"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."
"StreamSets should provide a mechanism to be able to perform data quality assessment when the data is being moved from one source to the target."
"We create pipelines or jobs in StreamSets Control Hub. It is a great feature, but if there is a way to have a folder structure or organize the pipelines and jobs in Control Hub, it would be great. I submitted a ticket for this some time back."
"One area for improvement could be the cloud storage server speed, as we have faced some latency issues here and there."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing model is very flexible."
"It is an expensive solution."
"StreamSets is an expensive solution."
"It has a CPU core-based licensing, which works for us and is quite good."
"There are two editions, Professional and Enterprise, and there is a free trial. We're using the Professional edition and it is competitively priced."
"The pricing is affordable for any business."
"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 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 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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
 

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 IBM Cloud Pak for Integration?
Enterprise bots are needed to balance products like Kafka and Confluent.
What is your primary use case for IBM Cloud Pak for Integration?
It manages APIs and integrates microservices at the enterprise level. It offers a range of capabilities for handling APIs, microservices, and various integration needs. The platform supports thousa...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM Cloud Pak for Integration?
IBM Cloud Pak for Integration includes monitoring capabilities to track the performance and health of your integrations. You can quickly roll back to a previous version if an issue arises. Addition...
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.
What advice do you have for others considering StreamSets?
If asked, I definitely recommend StreamSets to other users. My overall rating for the solution is nine.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CVS Health Corporation
Availity, BT Group, Humana, Deluxe, GSK, RingCentral, IBM, Shell, SamTrans, State of Ohio, TalentFulfilled, TechBridge
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Informatica, Palantir and others in Cloud Data Integration. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.