PubSub+ Platform vs Spring Cloud Data Flow comparison

Solace and VMware are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Solace is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.8. Solace holds a 3.0% mindshare in SA, compared to VMware’s 4.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Solace users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of VMware users who would recommend it.

PubSub+ Platform

Read 17 PubSub+ Platform reviews

1,216 Views
818 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Spring Cloud Data Flow

Read 9 Spring Cloud Data Flow reviews

1,751 Views
1,242 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Spring Cloud Data Flow

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Spring Cloud Data Flow and PubSub+ Platform compete in the data management sphere. Spring Cloud Data Flow edges ahead in pricing and support satisfaction, while PubSub+ Platform is favored for its superior features, making it a worthwhile investment.

Features: Spring Cloud Data Flow offers microservices-based streaming, batch data processing, and seamless Spring Boot integration. It includes robust data pipeline orchestration and failure handling with auto-retry mechanisms. PubSub+ Platform handles real-time event streaming, supports multiple messaging protocols, and provides advanced streaming analytics, all contributing to its real-time scalability advantage.

Room for Improvement: Spring Cloud Data Flow could improve its real-time data streaming capabilities and integrate more diverse messaging protocols. Enhancing its scalability features and providing more comprehensive analytics tools would also be beneficial. PubSub+ Platform could enhance its cost-effectiveness, simplify its initial setup, and improve community support and documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Spring Cloud Data Flow is flexible with Kubernetes and cloud platforms, supported by strong community resources. PubSub+ Platform offers cloud-native deployments and managed services for seamless IT ecosystem integration, with an emphasis on professional customer service enhancing deployment experiences.

Pricing and ROI: Spring Cloud Data Flow is cost-effective with a lower initial setup cost, providing a solid ROI for data orchestration. PubSub+ Platform, with a higher upfront investment, offers enhanced ROI through feature-rich offerings and high performance, justified by its scalability and robust analytics capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed PubSub+ Platform vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow

June 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

PubSub+ Platform

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

11th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (8th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (13th)

Spring Cloud Data Flow

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

9th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (21st)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 3.0%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Cloud Data Flow is 4.8%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

BhanuChidigam

Sofware Engineering Manager at Wells Fargo

Performs well, high availability, and helpful support

We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.

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NitinGoyal

Engineering Lead at Naukri.com

Has a plug-and-play model and provides good robustness and scalability

The solution's community support could be improved. I don't know why the Spring Cloud Data Flow community is not very strong. Community support is very limited whenever you face any problem or are stuck somewhere. I'm not sure whether it has improved in the last six months because this pipeline was set up almost two years ago. I struggled with that a lot. For example, there was limited support whenever I got an exception and sought help from Stack Overflow or different forums. Interacting with Kubernetes needs a few certificates. You need to define all the certificates within your application. With the help of those certificates, your Java application or Spring Cloud Data Flow can interact with Kubernetes. I faced a lot of hurdles while placing those certificates. Despite following the official documentation to define all the replicas, readiness, and liveliness probes within the Spring Cloud Data Flow application, it was not working. So, I had to troubleshoot while digging in and debugging the internals of Spring Cloud Data Flow at that time. It was just a configuration mismatch, and I was doing nothing weird. There was a small spelling difference between how Spring Cloud Data Flow was expecting it and how I passed it. I was just following the official documentation.

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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

"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."

"Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40 plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days."

"I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10."

"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable. It can be used for any kind of business where you've got multiple users who need information. Any company, such as LinkedIn, with a huge number of subscribers and any business, such as publishing, supermarket, airline, or shipping can use it."

"One of the main reasons for using PubSub+ is that it is a proper event manager that can handle events in a reactive way."

"The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live."

"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."

"In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

"The solution's most valuable feature is that it allows us to use different batch data sources, retrieve the data, and then do the data processing, after which we can convert and store it in the target."

"The most valuable feature is real-time streaming."

"The ease of deployment on Kubernetes, the seamless integration for orchestration of various pipelines, and the visual dashboard that simplifies operations even for non-specialists such as quality analysts."

"There are a lot of options in Spring Cloud. It's flexible in terms of how we can use it. It's a full infrastructure."

"The product is very user-friendly."

"The dashboards in Spring Cloud Dataflow are quite valuable."

"The most valuable features of Spring Cloud Data Flow are the simple programming model, integration, dependency Injection, and ability to do any injection. Additionally, auto-configuration is another important feature because we don't have to configure the database and or set up the boilerplate in the database in every project. The composability is good, we can create small workloads and compose them in any way we like."

"The best thing I like about Spring Cloud Data Flow is its plug-and-play model."

Cons

"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."

"A challenge we currently have is Solace's ability to integrate with single sign-on in our Active Directory and other single sign-on tools and platforms that any company would have. It's important for the platforms to work. Typically, they support only LDAP-based connectivity to our SQL Servers."

"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."

"I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka."

"The deployment process is complex."

"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."

"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."

"We've pointed out some things with the DMR piece, the event mesh, in edge cases where we could see a problem. Something like 99 percent of users wouldn't ever see this problem, but it has to do with if you get multiple bad clients sending data over a WAN, for example. That could then impact other clients."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

"The configurations could be better. Some configurations are a little bit time-consuming in terms of trying to understand using the Spring Cloud documentation."

"Spring Cloud Data Flow is not an easy-to-use tool, so improvements are required."

"The solution's community support could be improved."

"Spring Cloud Data Flow could improve the user interface. We can drag and drop in the application for the configuration and settings, and deploy it right from the UI, without having to run a CI/CD pipeline. However, that does not work with Kubernetes, it only works when we are working with jars as the Spring Cloud Data Flow applications."

"On the tool's online discussion forums, you may get stuck with an issue, making it an area where improvements are required."

"There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or refreshing the dashboard."

"Some of the features, like the monitoring tools, are not very mature and are still evolving."

"I would improve the dashboard features as they are not very user-friendly."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."

"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."

"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

"If you want support from Spring Cloud Data Flow there is a fee. The Spring Framework is open-source and this is a free solution."

"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."

"The solution provides value for money, and we are currently using its community edition."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

33%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

17%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was a...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?

My typical use case for the PubSub+ Platform is as an event-driven solution for communication between two components.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering PubSub+ Event Broker?

I have experience working with Kafka, PubSub+ Platform, and IBM MQ, all three of them. We are customers, meaning my company uses Solace. We use it and customize it based on our needs. Based on my e...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Spring Cloud Data Flow?

There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or r...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Spring Cloud Data Flow?

We had a project for content management, which involved multiple applications each handling content ingestion, transformation, enrichment, and storage for different customers independently. We want...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Spring Cloud Data Flow?

I would definitely recommend Spring Cloud Data Flow. It requires minimal additional effort or time to understand how it works, and even non-specialists can use it effectively with its friendly docu...

See all answers

Comparisons

Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 29% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 23% of the time

ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 11% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon SQS vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 6% of the time

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Apache Flink vs Spring Cloud Data Flow

Compared 41% of the time

TIBCO BusinessWorks vs Spring Cloud Data Flow

Compared 12% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Spring Cloud Data Flow

Compared 6% of the time

Apache Spark Streaming vs Spring Cloud Data Flow

Compared 5% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Spring Cloud Data Flow

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

June 2025

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Buyer's Guide

Spring Cloud Data Flow

May 2025

Download Spring Cloud Data Flow product report

Also Known As

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

No data available

Overview

PubSub+ Platform supports real-time shipment tracking, IT event management in multiclouds, and connects legacy and cloud-native systems for application modernization. It's utilized for trading, streaming market data, and app-to-app messaging, enhancing event-driven architectures with reliable message queuing.

Organizations adopt PubSub+ to efficiently transport events across hybrid and cloud environments, managing audit trails and long processing tasks. The platform aids integration through dynamic data publication, event mesh capabilities, and WAN optimization. Features like seamless integration, protocol agnosticism, and flexible topic hierarchy enhance versatility. Solace Admin Utility simplifies configuration and management, while the event portal allows hybrid deployment.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Dynamic Data Publication: Enables flexible and responsive data handling.
Event Mesh Capabilities: Facilitates efficient event transportation.
WAN Optimization: Enhances data transfer across networks.
Protocol Agnosticism: Supports a wide range of protocols for integration.
Flexible Topic Hierarchy: Allows detailed and organized data exchange.
Solace Admin Utility: Provides intuitive configuration and management.
Granular Topic Filtering: Offers precise data filtering options.
Guaranteed Messaging: Ensures reliable message delivery.

What benefits or ROI should users consider?

Seamless Integration: Reduces complexity in connecting systems.
Performance and Scaling: Supports high-load environments efficiently.
Asynchronous Messaging: Improves application performance.
Robust Support System: Provides guidance and problem resolution.

PubSub+ is implemented in industries requiring real-time data handling and integration between disparate systems. Financial institutions use it for trading and streaming market data, while logistics companies benefit from real-time shipment tracking. Enterprises apply it to modernize operations by connecting legacy systems with cloud-native applications, enhancing their architecture and ensuring data reliability across environments.

Solace

Spring Cloud Data Flow is a toolkit for building data integration and real-time data processing pipelines.
Pipelines consist of Spring Boot apps, built using the Spring Cloud Stream or Spring Cloud Task microservice frameworks. This makes Spring Cloud Data Flow suitable for a range of data processing use cases, from import/export to event streaming and predictive analytics. Use Spring Cloud Data Flow to connect your Enterprise to the Internet of Anything—mobile devices, sensors, wearables, automobiles, and more.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow

June 2025

Free Report: PubSub+ Platform vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow

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