Apache Flink vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Apache and Solace are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Apache is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.0, while Solace is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.8. Apache holds a 6.7% mindshare in SA, compared to Solace’s 3.9% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Solace users who would recommend it.

Apache Flink

Read 19 Apache Flink reviews

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5,521 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 20 PubSub+ Platform reviews

6,112 Views
2,567 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Apache Flink

PubSub+ Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Apache Flink vs. PubSub+ Platform

September 2026

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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

3rd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

PubSub+ Platform

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

14th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (10th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Flink is 6.7%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 3.9%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Apache Flink	6.7%
PubSub+ Platform	3.9%
Other	89.4%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Sanjay Srivastava

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.

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Deepankar Bbhowmick

Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Messaging design has become visual and reliable and now supports fast microservice communication

The unique functions I appreciate about PubSub+ Platform are that it allows me to design my solution in a graphical manner, which is not available in many other products, and the design can also be pushed to the actual infrastructure layer, making it quite advantageous. Mesh technology is useful in scenarios where different geographies have to be connected, although such situations are not commonly found. It is beneficial but not a super-used feature of PubSub+ Platform. The event replay function is quite mature in PubSub+ Platform, allowing me to replay messages that are days in the past, which is a good feature. The main benefits PubSub+ Platform provides for the end-user include building a robust and scalable system with very low network latency, which improves the customer experience, whether using mobile phones or applications. This type of messaging framework is extremely important, and Solace is a very good product in that space. Nowadays, most applications are built using microservices technology, with small microservices interchanging messages via PubSub+ Platform. Without it, realizing a scalable system would not be possible; for example, one cannot have Netflix or similar services that require quick data transit and a good user experience, ensuring that data cannot be lost in transit. The analytics part of PubSub+ Platform is quite useful as it can connect with many analytical software tools, mainly for analysis of system logs, such as Splunk, DataDog, or Prometheus. It has the flexibility to connect with any of these and supports OpenTelemetry, which is not available in many other products, making traceability very easy. I can see how a message travels from a source system to the target system, end-to-end, along with what happens to that message along the path, making the analytics quite good.

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

"The end-to-end latency was drastically reduced, and our capability of handling high throughput has increased by using Flink."

"The main advantage is the turnaround time, which has been reduced drastically because of Apache Flink, and now everything is in almost real time with no waiting or lag of data in the application while machine resources are utilized much more efficiently."

"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."

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

"Flink moved on to becoming a standard technology for location platform."

"This is truly a real-time solution."

"The documentation is very good."

More Apache Flink pros

"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."

"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."

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

"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."

"We have seen at least a 50 percent increase in productivity (compared to using Kafka) when using Solace for sharing changes in real-time, onboarding new subscribers, and modifying data sets."

"Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data."

"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."

"Solace has been incident free in HA deployment for seven years."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"Failure is another area where it is a bit rigid or not that flexible."

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

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

"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 should provide more examples and sample code related to streaming to help me better adapt and utilize the tool."

"There is a learning curve. It takes time to learn."

"Apache Flink should improve its data capability and data migration."

"PyFlink is not as fully featured as Python itself, so there are some limitations to what you can do with it."

More Apache Flink cons

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

"The section on observability pertains to understanding the functioning of an event crash. Instead of focusing on how the crash occurs, attention is given to the observable aspects, such as a memory pipeline where one person pushes messages and another reads them. However, this pipeline often encounters issues, such as the reader being unavailable, causing the system to become stuck and preventing the messages from moving forward. This can lead to the pipeline being permanently stalled."

"The deployment process is complex."

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

"Potential areas for improvement in PubSub+ Platform are its authentication mechanisms, which could be slightly better."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"It's an open source."

"It's an open-source solution."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"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."

"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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Retailer

15%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Construction Company

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	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

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...

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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...

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What advice do you have for others considering Apache Flink?

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

The pricing and setup cost of PubSub+ Platform is very seamless and reliable for medium and large-scale enterprises. For small-sized enterprises, it may be a higher cost, or they may be looking for...

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

PubSub+ Platform could improve by simplifying some advanced configurations and providing better visualization for event flow. Some advanced configurations in PubSub+ Platform could be made simpler ...

See all answers

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

PubSub+ Platform's main use case in our company is real-time data streaming using applications and API integrations. We are working on an IoT-based application, and our company handles most of the ...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apache Flink

October 2026

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Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

October 2026

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Also Known As

Flink

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

Overview

Apache Flink is a powerful open-source framework for stateful computations over data streams, designed for both real-time and batch processing. It efficiently handles massive volumes of data with low-latency responses, offering versatility for complex event processing scenarios.

Apache Flink excels in processing high-throughput data streams, enabling seamless state management across distributed applications. Users appreciate its robust features like stateful transformations and checkpointing, simplifying deployment in diverse environments. Though powerful, it poses challenges for beginners due to its complexity and limited documentation, requiring some prior experience to master. Its flexible integration with systems like Kafka and support for Kubernetes on AWS makes it suitable for demanding environments where quick, real-time analysis is essential.

What are the key features of Apache Flink?

Stateful Transformations: Allows complex stateful operations on data streams with precise handling.
Low Latency: Ensures real-time data processing with minimal delays.
Checkpointing: Provides efficient and reliable checkpointing for fault tolerance.
Kafka Integration: Easy integration with Kafka for seamless data ingestion and processing.
API Support: Provides robust APIs for diverse data processing needs.
Flexible Deployment: Offers options for deploying on-premise or in cloud environments.

What benefits should users look for?

Versatility: Supports both batch and stream processing in a unified model.
Community Support: Backed by an active community that continuously enhances its features.
Ease of Use: Simplifies the coding process compared to similar frameworks like Apache Storm.
Real-Time Analytics: Facilitates immediate insights and data-driven decision-making.

Organizations leverage Apache Flink primarily for real-time data processing in sectors such as retail, transportation, and telecommunications. By deploying on AWS with Kubernetes, companies can utilize it for data cleaning, generating customer insights, and providing swift real-time updates. It effectively manages millions of events per second, serving use cases like cab aggregations, map-making, and outlier detection in telecom networks, enabling seamless integration of streaming data with existing pipelines.

Apache

PubSub+ Platform is designed for real-time message publishing and outstanding interoperability. With features like intuitive administration and topic filtering, it offers both stability and high performance for scalable deployments across diverse scenarios.

PubSub+ Platform enhances data integration with its event mesh and seamless protocol compatibility, providing a comprehensive solution for organizations tracking shipments, generating reports, and managing transactions. Its granular topic filtering and WAN optimization ensure high utility in event-driven applications and cloud deployments. Users highlight the platform's intuitive administration and ease of management, though some seek improved integration with third-party tools and enhanced observability. Concerns include scalability for large payloads and training resource availability. Despite its interface complexity, PubSub+ remains valuable for trading and market data distribution.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Real-time messaging: Facilitates seamless communication across platforms.
Flexible topic hierarchy: Supports dynamic topic taxonomy for efficient data management.
Event mesh: Enhances integration and interoperability with diverse protocols.
Intuitive administration: Simplifies system management and configuration.
WAN optimization: Ensures efficient connectivity for global deployment.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Messaging stability: Offers consistent performance in dynamic environments.
Scalability: Provides seamless expansion to accommodate growing data volumes.
Security: Maintains robust protection for sensitive information.
Support and configuration: Accessible, reliable support, and UI-driven setup streamline the management.

PubSub+ Platform is widely implemented for asynchronous messaging in industries like finance for trading and market data, logistics for shipment tracking, and tech operations management. It enables companies to modernize applications while ensuring data accuracy and efficiency across global systems.

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

September 2026

Free Report: Apache Flink vs. PubSub+ Platform

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