Apache Flink vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

Apache and Solace are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Apache is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.8, while Solace is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.6. Apache holds a 13.2% mindshare in SA, compared to Solace’s 2.8% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Solace users who would recommend it.

Apache Flink

Read 16 Apache Flink reviews

5,090 Views
3,740 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 16 PubSub+ Platform reviews

1,353 Views
1,004 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Apache Flink

PubSub+ Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Apache Flink and PubSub+ Platform are both key players in the real-time data processing category. Apache Flink appears to have the upper hand in stream processing capabilities, while PubSub+ Platform is preferred for its robust messaging features.

Features:Apache Flink is known for stateful computation, high throughput, and precise low-latency operations, making it ideal for intricate real-time analytics. PubSub+ Platform is notable for its versatile message brokering, support of multiple messaging protocols, and dynamic message routing, which effectively addresses event-driven architecture needs.

Room for Improvement:Apache Flink can benefit from improved ease of use, more intuitive community support, and reduced deployment complexity. PubSub+ Platform could enhance its integration features, broaden its protocol support, and optimize its cost structure for better market competitiveness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Apache Flink offers deployment on various platforms such as Kubernetes but requires technical expertise, and its community-based support model may deter some users. PubSub+ Platform provides more accessible cloud-native deployment options with strong professional support, favorable for organizations seeking managed solutions.

Pricing and ROI:Apache Flink offers a lower setup cost, attributed to its open-source nature, which is ideal for users focused on cost-effective real-time analytics. PubSub+ Platform, while having potentially higher initial costs, ensures a solid ROI through its comprehensive messaging capabilities and outstanding support, making it a beneficial choice for event-driven applications.

To learn more, read our detailed Apache Flink vs. PubSub+ Platform Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Apache Flink vs. PubSub+ Platform

March 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

6th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 (6th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Flink is 13.2%, up from 9.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 2.8%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Ilya Afanasyev

Senior Software Development Engineer at Yahoo!

A great solution with an intricate system and allows for batch data processing

We value this solution's intricate system because it comes with a state inside the mechanism and product. The system allows us to process batch data, stream to real-time and build pipelines. Additionally, we do not need to process data from the beginning when we pause, and we can continue from the same point where we stopped. It helps us save time as 95% of our pipelines will now be on Amazon, and we'll save money by saving time.

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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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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."

"Allows us to process batch data, stream to real-time and build pipelines."

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

"Easy to deploy and manage."

"The documentation is very good."

"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."

"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 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."

More Apache Flink pros

"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."

"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."

"The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."

"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 topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."

"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

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

"The machine learning library is not very flexible."

"In terms of improvement, there should be better reporting. You can integrate with reporting solutions but Flink doesn't offer it themselves."

"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."

"Apache Flink's documentation should be available in more languages."

"In terms of stability with Flink, it is something that you have to deal with every time. Stability is the number one problem that we have seen with Flink, and it really depends on the kind of problem that you're trying to solve."

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

"In a future release, they could improve on making the error descriptions more clear."

More Apache Flink cons

"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."

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

"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."

"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."

"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."

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

"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."

"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building. A current workaround is using the message's header, where the business data can be put into this header and be used for a dynamic topic lookup. I want to see this in action when there are a couple of hundred cases live. E.g., how does it perform? From an administration perspective, is the ease of use there?"

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an open-source solution."

"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."

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

"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."

"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."

"The licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

35%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

There are more libraries that are missing and also maybe more capabilities for machine learning. It could have a friendly user interface for pipeline configuration, deployment, and monitoring.

See all answers

What do you like most about PubSub+ Event Broker?

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?

The price of the solution is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively. Additionally, providing a comprehensive dashboard t...

See all answers

Comparisons

Spring Cloud Data Flow vs Apache Flink

Compared 25% of the time

Databricks vs Apache Flink

Compared 21% of the time

Azure Stream Analytics vs Apache Flink

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Apache Flink

Compared 10% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Apache Flink

Compared 8% of the time

More Apache Flink Competitors

Apache Kafka vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 30% of the time

IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 23% of the time

ActiveMQ vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Confluent vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs PubSub+ Platform

Compared 2% of the time

More PubSub+ Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apache Flink

March 2025

Download Apache Flink product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

March 2025

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Also Known As

Flink

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

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

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

Sample Customers

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

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

Buyer's Guide

Apache Flink vs. PubSub+ Platform

March 2025

Free Report: Apache Flink vs. PubSub+ Platform

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