No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Apache Flink vs Informatica Data Engineering Streaming [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 15, 2026

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
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (4th)
Informatica Data Engineerin...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Sanjay Srivastava - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Architect at IBM
Streaming workflows have improved data integration and support real-time pipelines across platforms
We are not using Apache Flink in its advanced window capabilities. We are using the Apache Flink job in Apache SeaTunnel, meaning we can write the code inside Apache SeaTunnel. Currently, we are moving; both solutions are there. We are doing it on-premises with the help of Kubernetes and OpenShift. The main reason why Apache Flink is better is that it has more functions, and being open source with easy code in Apache SeaTunnel helps us achieve that. Cost is a major issue. I would rate the stability of the product as an eight. For Apache Flink, the final point can be rated an eight. I can recommend Apache Flink to other users for streaming support, and I am recommending it. I would rate this review an eight overall.
DK
BI Practice Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Helps with real-time data processing and improves decision-making overall
It improves decision-making overall for the company. Informatica is usually the tool for setting up the data, streaming the data into your data warehouse from your source, transforming the data, and preparing and modeling it into some desired format. It improves the performance. You need to know how to use it and how to implement it, but it improves performance.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Flink moved on to becoming a standard technology for location platform."
"With Flink, it provides out-of-the-box checkpointing and state management. It helps us in that way. When Storm used to restart, sometimes we would lose messages. With Flink, it provides guaranteed message processing, which helped us. It also helped us with maintenance or restarts."
"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."
"Another feature is how Flink handles its radiuses. It has something called the checkpointing concept. You're dealing with billions and billions of requests, so your system is going to fail in large storage systems. Flink handles this by using the concept of checkpointing and savepointing, where they write the aggregated state into some separate storage. So in case of failure, you can basically recall from that state and come back."
"It provides us the flexibility to deploy it on any cluster without being constrained by cloud-based limitations."
"The setup was not too difficult."
"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."
"It is user-friendly and the reporting is good."
"It improves the performance."
 

Cons

"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."
"In a future release, they could improve on making the error descriptions more clear."
"Failure is another area where it is a bit rigid or not that flexible."
"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."
"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."
"Amazon's CloudFormation templates don't allow for direct deployment in the private subnet."
"There is a learning curve. It takes time to learn."
"Flink has become a lot more stable but the machine learning library is still not very flexible."
"Skill requirement is required. There is a learning curve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an open source."
"This is an open-source platform that can be used free of charge."
"Apache Flink is open source so we pay no licensing for the use of the software."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The solution is open-source, which is free."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Streaming Analytics solutions are best for your needs.
900,277 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Retailer
13%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
33%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Construction Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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...
What is your primary use case for Apache Flink?
I am working with Apache Flink, which is the tool we use for data integration. Apache Flink is for data, and we are working on the data integration project, not big data, using Apache Flink and Apa...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Flink
Big Data Streaming, Informatica Intelligent Streaming, Intelligent Streaming
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

LogRhythm, Inc., Inter-American Development Bank, Scientific Technologies Corporation, LotLinx, Inc., Benevity, Inc.
Jewelry TV
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Apache and others in Streaming Analytics. Updated: June 2026.
900,277 professionals have used our research since 2012.