Apache Flink vs Azure Stream Analytics comparison

Apache and Microsoft are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Apache is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.0, while Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.1. Apache holds a 12.3% mindshare in SA, compared to Microsoft’s 6.2% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Apache Flink

Read 19 Apache Flink reviews

3,653 Views
3,653 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Azure Stream Analytics

Read 30 Azure Stream Analytics reviews

2,877 Views
2,618 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Apache Flink

Azure Stream Analytics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Azure Stream Analytics and Apache Flink compete in the stream processing category. Azure Stream Analytics has the upper hand in seamless integration with Azure services, while Apache Flink is preferred for advanced stateful processing capabilities.

Features: Azure Stream Analytics benefits from its integration with Azure infrastructure, offering seamless connectivity to IoT Hub, Blob storage, and SQL server for effective real-time analytics. Apache Flink excels in state management, providing features like checkpointing, stateful transformations, and robust event time processing for low-latency applications.

Room for Improvement: Azure Stream Analytics could enhance pricing transparency and extend integration flexibility with non-Azure tools. Its logging and data joining features need refinement. Apache Flink requires better Python support, and its complex infrastructure demands substantial expertise, making deployment and maintenance challenging.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Stream Analytics is known for its easy deployment on the public cloud and supportive Microsoft technical team, though increasing demands have affected the support quality. Apache Flink permits deployment across diverse environments but involves a steep learning curve despite extensive community support owing to its open-source nature.

Pricing and ROI: Azure Stream Analytics operates on a pay-as-you-go model, which can be costly for large-scale operations, though its pricing complexity is a noted issue. Apache Flink, being open-source, incurs no software cost, offering a favorable cost perspective and positive ROI when its unique strengths are leveraged.

To learn more, read our detailed Apache Flink vs. Azure Stream Analytics Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Apache Flink vs. Azure Stream Analytics

December 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

Apache Flink

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

4th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Azure Stream Analytics

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

3rd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Flink is 12.3%, up from 11.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Stream Analytics is 6.2%, down from 11.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Azure Stream Analytics	6.2%
Apache Flink	12.3%
Other	81.5%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Aswini Atibudhi

Distinguished AI Leader at Walmart Global Tech at Walmart

Enables robust real-time data processing but documentation needs refinement

Apache Flink is very powerful, but it can be challenging for beginners because it requires prior experience with similar tools and technologies, such as Kafka and batch processing. It's essential to have a clear foundation; hence, it can be tough for beginners. However, once they grasp the concepts and have examples or references, it becomes easier. Intermediate users who are integrating with Kafka or other sources may find it smoother. After setting up and understanding the concepts, it becomes quite stable and scalable, allowing for customization of jobs. Every software, including Apache Flink, has room for improvement as it evolves. One key area for enhancement is user-friendliness and the developer experience; improving documentation and API specifications is essential, as they can currently be verbose and complex. Debugging and local testing pose challenges for newcomers, particularly when learning about concepts such as time semantics and state handling. Although the APIs exist, they aren't intuitive enough. We also need to simplify operational procedures, such as developing tools and tuning Flink clusters, as these processes can be quite complex. Additionally, implementing one-click rollback for failures and improving state management during dynamic scaling while retaining the last states is vital, as the current large states pose scaling challenges.

Read full review

Chandra Mani

Technical architect at Tech Mahindra

Has supported real-time data validation and processing across multiple use cases but can improve consumer-side integration and streamlined customization

I widely use AKS, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure App Service, and there are APM Gateway kinds of things. I also utilize API Management and Front Door to expose any multi-region application I have, including Web Application Firewalls, and many more—around 20 to 60 services. I use Key Vault for managing secrets and monitoring Azure App Insights for tracing and monitoring. Additionally, I employ AI search for indexer purposes, processing chatbot data or any GenAI integration. I widely use OpenAI for GenAI, integrating various models with our platform. I extensively use hybrid cloud solutions to connect on-premise cloud or cloud to another network, employing public private endpoints or private link service endpoints. Azure DevOps is also on my list, and I leverage many security concepts for end-to-end design. I consider how end users access applications to data storage and secure the entire platform for authenticated users across various use cases, including B2C, B2B, or employee scenarios. I also widely design multi-tenant applications, utilizing Azure AD or Azure AD B2C for consumers. Azure Stream Analytics reads from any real-time stream; it's designed for processing millions of records every millisecond. They utilize Event Hubs for this purpose, as it allows for event processing. After receiving data from various sources, we validate and store it in a data store. Azure Stream Analytics can consume data from Event Hubs, applying basic validation rules to determine the validity of each record before processing.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Apache Flink offers a range of powerful configurations and experiences for development teams. Its strength lies in its development experience and capabilities."

"It is user-friendly and the reporting is good."

"Apache Flink is meant for low latency applications. You take one event opposite if you want to maintain a certain state. When another event comes and you want to associate those events together, in-memory state management was a key feature for us."

"The event processing function is the most useful or the most used function. The filter function and the mapping function are also very useful because we have a lot of data to transform. For example, we store a lot of information about a person, and when we want to retrieve this person's details, we need all the details. In the map function, we can actually map all persons based on their age group. That's why the mapping function is very useful. We can really get a lot of events, and then we keep on doing what we need to do."

"Apache Flink's best feature is its data streaming tool."

"It provides us the flexibility to deploy it on any cluster without being constrained by cloud-based limitations."

"Apache Flink provides faster and low-cost investment for me; I find it to have low hardware requirements, and it's faster with low code, meaning it's easy to understand for moving the streaming data."

"The product helps us to create both simple and complex data processing tasks. Over time, it has facilitated integration and navigation across multiple data sources tailored to each client's needs. We use Apache Flink to control our clients' installations."

More Apache Flink pros

"The best features of Azure Stream Analytics are that it's easy to set up and configure."

"The most valuable features of Azure Stream Analytics are the ease of provisioning and the interface is not terribly complex."

"Azure Stream Analytics reads from any real-time stream; it's designed for processing millions of records every millisecond."

"The solution's technical support is good."

"I like all the connected ecosystems of Microsoft, it is really good with other BI tools that are easy to connect."

"It's scalable as a cloud product."

"The solution has a lot of functionality that can be pushed out to companies."

"The most valuable aspect is the SQL option that Azure Stream Analytics provides."

More Azure Stream Analytics pros

Cons

"We have a machine learning team that works with Python, but Apache Flink does not have full support for the language."

"One way to improve Flink would be to enhance integration between different ecosystems. For example, there could be more integration with other big data vendors and platforms similar in scope to how Apache Flink works with Cloudera. Apache Flink is a part of the same ecosystem as Cloudera, and for batch processing it's actually very useful but for real-time processing there could be more development with regards to the big data capabilities amongst the various ecosystems out there."

"The state maintains checkpoints and they use RocksDB or S3. They are good but sometimes the performance is affected when you use RocksDB for checkpointing."

"The machine learning library is not very flexible."

"The TimeWindow feature is a bit tricky. The timing of the content and the windowing is a bit changed in 1.11. They have introduced watermarks. A watermark is basically associating every data with a timestamp. The timestamp could be anything, and we can provide the timestamp. So, whenever I receive a tweet, I can actually assign a timestamp, like what time did I get that tweet. The watermark helps us to uniquely identify the data. Watermarks are tricky if you use multiple events in the pipeline. For example, you have three resources from different locations, and you want to combine all those inputs and also perform some kind of logic. When you have more than one input screen and you want to collect all the information together, you have to apply TimeWindow all. That means that all the events from the upstream or from the up sources should be in that TimeWindow, and they were coming back. Internally, it is a batch of events that may be getting collected every five minutes or whatever timing is given. Sometimes, the use case for TimeWindow is a bit tricky. It depends on the application as well as on how people have given this TimeWindow. This kind of documentation is not updated. Even the test case documentation is a bit wrong. It doesn't work. Flink has updated the version of Apache Flink, but they have not updated the testing documentation. Therefore, I have to manually understand it. We have also been exploring failure handling. I was looking into changelogs for which they have posted the future plans and what are they going to deliver. We have two concerns regarding this, which have been noted down. I hope in the future that they will provide this functionality. Integration of Apache Flink with other metric services or failure handling data tools needs some kind of update or its in-depth knowledge is required in the documentation. We have a use case where we want to actually analyze or get analytics about how much data we process and how many failures we have. For that, we need to use Tomcat, which is an analytics tool for implementing counters. We can manage reports in the analyzer. This kind of integration is pretty much straightforward. They say that people must be well familiar with all the things before using this type of integration. They have given this complete file, which you can update, but it took some time. There is a learning curve with it, which consumed a lot of time. It is evolving to a newer version, but the documentation is not demonstrating that update. The documentation is not well incorporated. Hopefully, these things will get resolved now that they are implementing it. Failure is another area where it is a bit rigid or not that flexible. We never use this for scaling because complexity is very high in case of a failure. Processing and providing the scaled data back to Apache Flink is a bit challenging. They have this concept of offsetting, which could be simplified."

"Amazon's CloudFormation templates don't allow for direct deployment in the private subnet."

"There is room for improvement in the initial setup process."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

More Apache Flink cons

"There is a need for improvement in reprocessing or validation without custom code. Azure Stream Analytics currently allows some degree of code writing, which could be simplified with low-code or no-code platforms to enhance performance."

"There may be some issues when connecting with Microsoft Power BI because we are providing the input and output commands, and there's a chance of it being delayed while connecting."

"I would like to have a contact individual at Microsoft."

"Early in the process, we had some issues with stability."

"Azure Stream Analytics is challenging to customize because it's not very flexible."

"One area that could use improvement is the handling of data validation. Currently, there is a review process, but sometimes the validation fails even before the job is executed. This results in wasted time as we have to rerun the job to identify the failure."

"The solution's interface could be simpler to understand for non-technical people."

"Regarding technical support for Azure Stream Analytics, it's not good."

More Azure Stream Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is open-source, which is free."

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

"It's an open source."

"It's an open-source solution."

"Apache Flink is open source so we pay no licensing for the use of the software."

"The cost of this solution is less than competitors such as Amazon or Google Cloud."

"The current price is substantial."

"When scaling up, the pricing for Azure Stream Analytics can get relatively high. Considering its capabilities compared to other solutions, I would rate it a seven out of ten for cost. However, we've found ways to optimize costs using tools like Databricks for specific tasks."

"We pay approximately $500,000 a year. It's approximately $10,000 a year per license."

"The licensing for this product is payable on a 'pay as you go' basis. This means that the cost is only based on data volume, and the frequency that the solution is used."

"Azure Stream Analytics is a little bit expensive."

"There are different tiers based on retention policies. There are four tiers. The pricing varies based on steaming units and tiers. The standard pricing is $10/hour."

"I rate the price of Azure Stream Analytics a four out of five."

More Azure Stream Analytics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Retailer

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	18

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache Flink?

The product helps us to create both simple and complex data processing tasks. Over time, it has facilitated integration and navigation across multiple data sources tailored to each client's needs. ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Flink?

The solution is expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Apache Flink?

Apache could improve Apache Flink by providing more functionality, as they need to fully support data integration. The connectors are still very few for Apache Flink. There is a lack of functionali...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?

Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Stream Analytics?

Azure charges in various ways based on incoming and outgoing data processing activities. Choosing between pay-as-you-go or enterprise models can affect pricing, and depending on data volume, charge...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Azure Stream Analytics?

There is a need for improvement in reprocessing or validation without custom code. Azure Stream Analytics currently allows some degree of code writing, which could be simplified with low-code or no...

See all answers

Comparisons

Spring Cloud Data Flow vs Apache Flink

Compared 15% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Flink

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Flink

Compared 10% of the time

Confluent vs Apache Flink

Compared 10% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Apache Flink

Compared 7% of the time

More Apache Flink Competitors

Amazon MSK vs Azure Stream Analytics

Compared 19% of the time

Databricks vs Azure Stream Analytics

Compared 15% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Azure Stream Analytics

Compared 12% of the time

Apache Spark Streaming vs Azure Stream Analytics

Compared 7% of the time

Aiven Platform vs Azure Stream Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apache Flink

January 2026

Download Apache Flink product report

Buyer's Guide

Azure Stream Analytics

January 2026

Download Azure Stream Analytics product report

Also Known As

Flink

ASA

Overview

Apache Flink is an open-source batch and stream data processing engine. It can be used for batch, micro-batch, and real-time processing. Flink is a programming model that combines the benefits of batch processing and streaming analytics by providing a unified programming interface for both data sources, allowing users to write programs that seamlessly switch between the two modes. It can also be used for interactive queries.

Flink can be used as an alternative to MapReduce for executing iterative algorithms on large datasets in parallel. It was developed specifically for large to extremely large data sets that require complex iterative algorithms.

Flink is a fast and reliable framework developed in Java, Scala, and Python. It runs on the cluster that consists of data nodes and managers. It has a rich set of features that can be used out of the box in order to build sophisticated applications.

Flink has a robust API and is ready to be used with Hadoop, Cassandra, Hive, Impala, Kafka, MySQL/MariaDB, Neo4j, as well as any other NoSQL database.

Apache Flink Features

Distributed execution of streaming programs on clusters of computers
Support for multiple data sources and sinks: this includes Hadoop file systems, databases, and other data sources
Streaming SQL query engine with support for windowing functions
Low latency query execution in milliseconds
Runs in a distributed fashion: it can be deployed on multiple machines or nodes to increase performance and reliability of data processing pipelines.
Powerful API that supports both batch and streaming applications
Runs on clusters of commodity hardware with minimal configuration
Can be integrated with other technologies, such as Apache Spark for complex data mining

Apache Flink Benefits

Ease of use: Flink has an intuitive API and provides high-level abstractions for handling data streams. Even beginners in the field can work with the platform with ease.

Fault tolerance: Flink can automatically detect and recover from failures in the system.

Scalability: Flink scales to thousands of nodes. It can run on clusters of any size and the user does not have to worry about managing the cluster.

Reviews from Real Users

Apache Flink stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its low latency and its user-friendly interface. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

The head of data and analytics at a computer software company notes, “The top feature of Apache Flink is its low latency for fast, real-time data. Another great feature is the real-time indicators and alerts which make a big difference when it comes to data processing and analysis.”

Ertugrul A., manager at a computer software company, writes, “It's usable and affordable. It is user-friendly and the reporting is good.”

Apache

Azure Stream Analytics is a robust real-time analytics service that has been designed for critical business workloads. Users are able to build an end-to-end serverless streaming pipeline in minutes. Utilizing SQL, users are able to go from zero to production with a few clicks, all easily extensible with unique code and automatic machine learning abilities for the most advanced scenarios.

Azure Stream Analytics has the ability to analyze and accurately process exorbitant volumes of high-speed streaming data from numerous sources at the same time. Patterns and scenarios are quickly identified and information is gathered from various input sources, such as social media feeds, applications, clickstreams, sensors, and devices. These patterns can then be implemented to trigger actions and launch workflows, such as feeding data to a reporting tool, storing data for later use, or creating alerts. Azure Stream Analytics is also offered on Azure IoT Edge runtime, so the data can be processed on IoT devices.

Top Benefits

User friendly: Azure Stream Analytics is very straightforward and easy to use. Out of the box and with a few clicks, users are able to connect to numerous sources and sinks, and easily develop an end-to-end pipeline. Stream Analytics can easily connect to Azure IoT Hub and Azure Event Hub for streaming ingestion, in addition to connecting with Azure Blob storage for historical data ingestion.
Flexible deployment: For low-latency analytics, Azure Stream Analytics can run on Azure Stack or IoT edge. For large-scale analytics, the solution can run in the cloud. Azure Stream Analytics uses the same query language and tools for both the cloud and the edge, facilitating an easier process for developers to design exceptional hybrid architectures for streaming processes.
Cost-effective: With Azure Stream Analytics, users only pay for the streaming units they consume; there are no upfront costs. Users can easily scale up or down as needed; there is no commitment or cluster provisioning.
Trustworthy: Azure Stream Analytics guarantees event processing to be 99.99% available with a minute level of granularity. Azure Stream Analytics has embedded recovery capabilities and checkpoints to keep things running smoothly at all times. Events are never lost with Azure Stream Analytics at-least once delivery of events and exactly one event processing.

Reviews from Real Users

“Azure Stream Analytics is something that you can use to test out streaming scenarios very quickly in the general sense and it is useful for IoT scenarios. If I was to do a project with IoT and I needed a streaming solution, Azure Stream Analytics would be a top choice. The most valuable features of Azure Stream Analytics are the ease of provisioning and the interface is not terribly complex.” - Olubisi A., Team Lead at a tech services company.

“It's used primarily for data and mining - everything from the telemetry data side of things. It's great for streaming and makes everything easy to handle. The streaming from the IoT hub and the messaging are aspects I like a lot.” - Sudhendra U., Technical Architect at Infosys

Microsoft

Sample Customers

LogRhythm, Inc., Inter-American Development Bank, Scientific Technologies Corporation, LotLinx, Inc., Benevity, Inc.

Rockwell Automation, Milliman, Honeywell Building Solutions, Arcoflex Automation Solutions, Real Madrid C.F., Aerocrine, Ziosk, Tacoma Public Schools, P97 Networks

Buyer's Guide

Apache Flink vs. Azure Stream Analytics

December 2025

Free Report: Apache Flink vs. Azure Stream Analytics

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