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IBM Streams vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 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

IBM Streams
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
23rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (8th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of IBM Streams is 2.1%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 4.0%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PubSub+ Platform4.0%
IBM Streams2.1%
Other93.9%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Ahmed_Emad - PeerSpot reviewer
Territory Sales Leader at Sumerge
A solution for data pipelines but has connector limitations
We have used Kafka for seven years. IBM streams gives you many OOTB features that can boost the time-to-market, especially when it comes to reporting and monitoring for example. Confluent is recognized as one of the leaders in this space and the main reason for this is related to the complete vision of the platform also the large number of connectors. This gives the edge and competitive advatnage.
Deepankar Bbhowmick - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Messaging design has become visual and reliable and now supports fast microservice communication
The unique functions I appreciate about PubSub+ Platform are that it allows me to design my solution in a graphical manner, which is not available in many other products, and the design can also be pushed to the actual infrastructure layer, making it quite advantageous. Mesh technology is useful in scenarios where different geographies have to be connected, although such situations are not commonly found. It is beneficial but not a super-used feature of PubSub+ Platform. The event replay function is quite mature in PubSub+ Platform, allowing me to replay messages that are days in the past, which is a good feature. The main benefits PubSub+ Platform provides for the end-user include building a robust and scalable system with very low network latency, which improves the customer experience, whether using mobile phones or applications. This type of messaging framework is extremely important, and Solace is a very good product in that space. Nowadays, most applications are built using microservices technology, with small microservices interchanging messages via PubSub+ Platform. Without it, realizing a scalable system would not be possible; for example, one cannot have Netflix or similar services that require quick data transit and a good user experience, ensuring that data cannot be lost in transit. The analytics part of PubSub+ Platform is quite useful as it can connect with many analytical software tools, mainly for analysis of system logs, such as Splunk, DataDog, or Prometheus. It has the flexibility to connect with any of these and supports OpenTelemetry, which is not available in many other products, making traceability very easy. I can see how a message travels from a source system to the target system, end-to-end, along with what happens to that message along the path, making the analytics quite good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product has enabled us to create solutions to client problems that would have either been impossible or very expensive/difficult using other technologies."
"As a result, the TELCO company was able to cut down the time it took to respond to customer needs and there were fewer complaints."
"The OEM Solution (Excel-medical.com) running on top of IBM Streams provides real-time clinical algorithms that can give better insight into the patient's acuity, thus cutting off time to discharge patients and inversely making sure that sick patients don't get discharged until ready."
"Easy development and deployment, Java implementation features, and the real time analyser and alarm function are the most valuable features for us."
"We've built a lot of products into it and it's been quite easy to feed market data onto the systems and put entitlements and controls around that. That was a big win for us when we were consolidating our platforms down. Trying to have one event bus, one messaging bus, for the whole globe, and consolidate everything over time, has been key for us. We've been able to do that through one API, even if it's across the different languages."
"Solace has been incident free in HA deployment for seven years."
"I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10."
"Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data."
"From my pursuit of the secret sauce, I found that Solace really is, for us, the service and the partnership that we have with the company, having the level of expertise and the subject matter knowledge available to us is second to none."
"The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."
"It is a product that is more like a switch or router, where you install it, then it keeps on working."
"One of the main reasons for using PubSub+ is that it is a proper event manager that can handle events in a reactive way."
 

Cons

"I’d like to see a tool kit specifically targeted at incremental machine learning. It’s already great for scoring previously trained models, but dynamically updating models is currently more of a 'grow your own' kind of thing."
"The development IDE sometimes crashes and freezes."
"The price and versatility of this product need to improve - it is not inexpensive."
"We had some stability issues where we used embedded Zookeeper in production."
"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."
"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building."
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
"I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka."
"We have struggled in a sort of perpetual PoC mode internally."
"Additional in-line information about certain things on PubSub+ Platform could be more beneficial for new users who are just starting to use this technology."
"For improvements, I would suggest increasing the max payload size to a limit of 100MB or more. The current max payload size is limited to 5MB."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."
"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."
"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."
"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."
"Having a free version is critical for our technology operations use case. This is primarily because our technology operations team is a cost center in our company. They are not profit drivers and having a free version for installation will probably meet our needs. Even for production, it'll support up to a 100,000 messages per second. I don't think in technology operations that we have that many events and alerts from our detection tools. Even if I have 20 or 30 event detection products out there, they're only going to publish the things which are critical or warnings. I don't think we'll ever reach a 100,000 messages per second."
"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
16%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?
The pricing and setup cost of PubSub+ Platform is very seamless and reliable for medium and large-scale enterprises. For small-sized enterprises, it may be a higher cost, or they may be looking for...
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
PubSub+ Platform could improve by simplifying some advanced configurations and providing better visualization for event flow. Some advanced configurations in PubSub+ Platform could be made simpler ...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
PubSub+ Platform's main use case in our company is real-time data streaming using applications and API integrations. We are working on an IoT-based application, and our company handles most of the ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

IBM InfoSphere Streams
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Globo TV, All England Lawn Tennis Club, CenterPoint Energy, Consolidated Communications Holdings, Darwin Ecosystem, Emory University Hospital, ICICI Securities, Irish Centre for Fetal and Neonatal Translational Research (INFANT), Living Roads, Mobileum, Optibus, Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP), University of Alberta, University of Montana, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Wimbledon 2015
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Streams vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.