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IBM Streams vs Redpanda comparison

 

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
24th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Redpanda
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of IBM Streams is 2.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Redpanda is 2.0%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Redpanda2.0%
IBM Streams2.2%
Other95.8%
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.
ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Analyst at CLSA
Event streaming has simplified video data cleanup and now powers real-time analytics
One area for improvement is providing more examples. For instance, Redpanda could be more useful as a sink where you get the data and can directly push to S3. While this is possible through the API, there are better and faster ways to do it. You can make a million API calls and accomplish the task in one and a half hours, but the same thing can be done in ten minutes through other methods. These faster approaches are not documented in obvious places. You have to find information scattered across various blogs. Redpanda should collect all the good blogs and best practices and put them in their documentation. This is more about knowledge management and making it easy for users to understand the product for complex use cases. For simple use cases, it is straightforward. We all use the basic pipe functionality. However, providing more examples would be useful. For example, integration with AWS and the AWS ecosystem would be cool.

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."
"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."
"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."
"What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++, which is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications."
"The good part about Redpanda is that there is a free part, which is great, and it is embedding most Kafka features so you have a number of features similar to Confluent but for free, which is great."
"Redpanda has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to move from a batch approach to a more streaming approach for our jobs, which cuts down on our delivery time and allows us to better meet our SLAs for our clients."
"I have seen positive outcomes including improved efficiency, cost savings, and better performance metrics because it is open-source, fast, and good."
"I do want to mention that there was a part of Redpanda where you can configure and create containers with Docker."
"Redpanda was simple and fast, so we went with Redpanda and it just works."
"I tested it with ten-plus nodes, and it's highly scalable."
"I would recommend Redpanda to others because it's easy to set up, consumes less resources, and is stable compared to other tools."
 

Cons

"The price and versatility of this product need to improve - it is not inexpensive."
"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."
"We had some stability issues where we used embedded Zookeeper in production."
"The development IDE sometimes crashes and freezes."
"For me, I was trying to get a lot of data, but I would only get one day's worth of data, even though I asked how I could increase the retention size."
"Redpanda can be improved in several ways, and the more I experiment with the product, the more limitations I find."
"Redpanda needs more visibility and primarily greater access to documentation."
"Redpanda is not the best technology available on the market."
"Redpanda can be improved as the support they provide for BYOC could be better."
"The command-line tools need to be improved. To quickly check the status of the topics and all."
"When it comes to self-hosting, their documentation could be improved."
"One issue I had with Redpanda was debugging an issue where our API would stall whenever we output to our API, and I was not seeing anything in the logs explaining why it was taking a long time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It's free. Everybody can use it, only support is paid."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
20%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Educational Organization
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Redpanda?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Redpanda, I am exploring the product. If I am convinced about the product and the capabilities, and I am sure I will be because I...
What needs improvement with Redpanda?
Redpanda can be improved in several ways, and the more I experiment with the product, the more limitations I find. I understand that this is about business, and the product should grow, and they ha...
What is your primary use case for Redpanda?
My main use case for Redpanda is primarily for streaming, and I am currently focusing on building data lakehouses because I find them really interesting. Redpanda fits into my data lakehouse setup ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

IBM InfoSphere Streams
No data available
 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Streams vs. Redpanda and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.