AWS Lambda vs Apache NiFi comparison

Apache and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Apache is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.9, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. Apache holds a 9.5% mindshare in CS, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 13.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

Apache NiFi

Read 22 Apache NiFi reviews

1,725 Views
1,139 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

AWS Lambda

Read 90 AWS Lambda reviews

2,034 Views
1,831 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Apache NiFi

AWS Lambda

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

AWS Lambda and Apache NiFi compete in serverless computing and data flow management, respectively. AWS Lambda has the upper hand in scalability and ease of integration with AWS services, whereas Apache NiFi excels in data flow management with its visual interface.

Features: AWS Lambda offers scalability, easy integration with AWS services, and a serverless architecture for efficient performance. Developers appreciate its support for multiple languages and the pay-as-you-go model that eliminates the need for infrastructure maintenance. Apache NiFi focuses on visual data flow management, offering extensive processor availability and built-in provenance tracking, enabling effective data orchestration and transformation.

Room for Improvement:AWS Lambda faces challenges with cold start delays, limited non-AWS service integration, and execution time restrictions. It also requires enhancements in monitoring, debugging, and support for additional programming languages. Apache NiFi struggles with complex operations and limited cloud-native features, necessitating better integration with various data formats and improved stability and user-friendly interfaces.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:AWS Lambda's deployment is straightforward in public cloud environments, supported by comprehensive documentation and positive customer feedback. However, the need for paid support is sometimes viewed as restrictive. Apache NiFi, typically deployed in on-premises or hybrid environments, presents a steeper learning curve and more complex setup. While support is adequate, configuration and deployment complexities pose challenges.

Pricing and ROI: AWS Lambda provides cost-effective pay-as-you-go pricing, attractive scalability, and no upfront infrastructure costs, yielding high ROI but increasing expenses with frequent invocations. Apache NiFi, an open-source solution, offers a cost advantage for self-managed deployments. Its integration with platforms like Cloudera enhances pricing but delivers strong ROI in large-scale data processing.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Lambda vs. Apache NiFi Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda vs. Apache NiFi

December 2025

Download the complete report

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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:

ROI

Sentiment score

4.8

Apache NiFi users experience significant time savings and improved efficiency, although exact cost benefits aren't always quantifiable.

Sentiment score

7.1

AWS Lambda offers cost savings and high ROI through its pay-as-you-go model, auto-scaling, and serverless infrastructure.

Thanks to improvements on both our side in how we run processes and enhancements to Apache NiFi, we have reduced the time commitment to almost not needing to interact with Apache NiFi except for minor queue-clearance tasks, allowing it to run smoothly.

BJ Tan

Data Engineer at The Kudelski Group

It supports not just ETL but also ELT, allowing us to save significant time.

Nishant Khandelwal

Team Lead Technical Specialist (Production Support) at a recreational facilities/services company with 11-50 employees

There may be return on investment based on the technology and easily moving our workloads onto Apache NiFi from our previous system.

SyedIsmail

Senior Consultant - Data Analytics at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Apache NiFi report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

5.7

Apache NiFi users find support adequate, using documentation and forums, with mixed reviews on official support and positive Cloudera experiences.

Sentiment score

6.9

AWS Lambda support is efficient and knowledgeable, but some users find cost a barrier for higher service levels.

The customer support is really good, and they are helpful whenever concerns are posted, responding immediately.

reviewer2785560

Cloud Data Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Customer support for Apache NiFi has been excellent, with minimal response times whenever we raise cases that cannot be directly addressed by logs.

Nishant Khandelwal

Team Lead Technical Specialist (Production Support) at a recreational facilities/services company with 11-50 employees

I would rate the customer support of Apache NiFi a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.

reviewer2784384

Partner at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Apache NiFi report

When we raise a ticket or have an issue, the support team is responsive.

Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

6.7

Apache NiFi's scalability varies; some users succeed with clusters, while others struggle without Kubernetes, impacting implementation.

Sentiment score

7.8

AWS Lambda efficiently scales with demand, offering seamless serverless operations, integration with AWS services, but may become costly.

Depending on the workload we process, it remains stable since at the end of the day, it is just used as an orchestration tool that triggers the job while the heavy lifting is done on Spark servers.

Debashish Dhar

Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Scaling up is fairly straightforward, provided you manage configurations effectively.

BJ Tan

Data Engineer at The Kudelski Group

Based on the workload, more nodes can be added to make a bigger cluster, which enhances the cluster whenever needed.

reviewer2785560

Cloud Data Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Apache NiFi report

I would rate how scalable AWS Lambda is a nine on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 would be the lowest and 10 would be the highest level of scalability.

reviewer2706945

Assistant Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Whenever the number of requests increases, the system automatically scales up to the target we have set and scales down once the requests are resolved.

Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

7.4

Apache NiFi is generally stable but may face occasional crashes and reliability challenges, especially in distributed environments.

Sentiment score

8.1

AWS Lambda is highly stable, reliable, and integrates well, though limited by timeout constraints, rated 8-9 for stability.

I have seen Apache NiFi crashing at times, which is one of the issues we have faced in production.

Debashish Dhar

Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Apache NiFi is stable in most cases.

SyedIsmail

Senior Consultant - Data Analytics at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Apache NiFi report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Room For Improvement

Apache NiFi needs improved integration, UI, scalability, security features, and seamless CI/CD processes for enhanced usability and efficiency.

AWS Lambda users desire improved integration, user-friendliness, language support, execution speed, monitoring, setup, customization, and computational capabilities.

Apache NiFi should have APIs or connectors that can connect seamlessly to other external entities, whether in the cloud or on-premises, creating a plug-and-play mechanism.

Debashish Dhar

Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

The history of processed files should be more readable so that not only the centralized teams managing Apache NiFi but also application folks who are new to the platform can read how a specific document is traversing through Apache NiFi.

Nishant Khandelwal

Team Lead Technical Specialist (Production Support) at a recreational facilities/services company with 11-50 employees

The initial error did not indicate it was related to memory or size limitations but appeared as a parsing error or something similar.

BJ Tan

Data Engineer at The Kudelski Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Apache NiFi report

AWS Lambda needs to improve cold start time.

Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Setup Cost

Apache NiFi is an open-source solution with no setup costs, offering time-saving efficiencies despite potential integration expenses.

AWS Lambda offers cost-effective, pay-per-use pricing, ideal for low-traffic workloads, with potential cost escalation if unmonitored.

The pricing in Italy is considered a little bit high, but the product is worth it.

reviewer2784384

Partner at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Apache NiFi report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Valuable Features

Apache NiFi simplifies data flow orchestration with drag-and-drop features, scalability, and integration, enhancing productivity and reliability.

AWS Lambda provides serverless architecture, automatic scaling, seamless integrations, cost efficiency, and simplified deployment for efficient application development.

Apache NiFi has positively impacted my organization by definitely bridging the gap between the on-premises and cloud interaction until we find a solution to open the firewall for cloud components to directly interact with on-premises services.

Debashish Dhar

Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Development has improved with a reduction in time spent being the main benefit; before we needed a matter of days to create the ingestion flows, but now it only takes a couple of hours to configure.

reviewer2784747

Senior Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The ease of use in Apache NiFi has helped my team because anyone can learn how to use it in a short amount of time, so we were able to get a lot of work done.

SyedIsmail

Senior Consultant - Data Analytics at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Apache NiFi report

Automatic scaling is a valuable feature. When the number of requests increases, the system automatically scales up to the target we have set and scales down once the requests are resolved.

Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Categories and Ranking

Apache NiFi

Ranking in Compute Service

7th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

5.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

AWS Lambda

Ranking in Compute Service

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Apache NiFi is 9.5%, up from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lambda is 13.8%, down from 20.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Compute Service Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
AWS Lambda	13.8%
Apache NiFi	9.5%
Other	76.7%

Compute Service

Featured Reviews

Yamini Vadlamudi

architect with 51-200 employees

Unified data flows have simplified large-scale ingestion and have improved SLA reliability

Improvements can be made in the way of the UI. From the deployment perspective, Git configurations are available in 2.6 versions and 2.0 and later versions of Apache NiFi. Before 2.0, templates had to be created and stored in Apache NiFi Registry, which is available. However, templates still need to be imported and exported manually if moving from one environment to another environment. Even in 2.0 versions, although GitHub configurations are available, how it will function needs to be evaluated. Seamless CI/CD deployments are somewhat tricky and challenging when it comes to Apache NiFi with the proper approvals, moving that flow to another environment, and giving the proper RBAC controls. These are areas that could be improved. Documentation is adequate, but the only pain point is the deployment aspect.

Read full review

Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

Has enabled us to manage compute resources efficiently while supporting multiple languages

AWS Lambda needs to improve cold start time. Some AWS Lambda functions require a cold start, and if you need AWS Lambda to provide quick responses, you need some of the AWS Lambdas to be always on, which is risky. We need AWS Lambda's cold start time to be reduced so that we can use it much faster than now. We need a better way to handle the cold start. We should be able to start AWS Lambda much before in a predictable way instead of just calling and then having it start.

Read full review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

University

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	18

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	35
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	43

Questions from the Community

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

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was fine, as the integration with the AWS Marketplace was very good. The pricing in Italy is considered a little bit high, but the product is ...

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What needs improvement with Apache NiFi?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Apache NiFi?

Apache NiFi is used to fetch data from different sources and ingest it into different destinations. The entire platform depends on Apache NiFi for data transformation and data movement. Multiple so...

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Which is better, AWS Lambda or Batch?

AWS Lambda is a serverless solution. It doesn’t require any infrastructure, which allows for cost savings. There is no setup process to deal with, as the entire solution is in the cloud. If you use...

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What do you like most about AWS Lambda?

The tool scales automatically based on the number of incoming requests.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lambda?

The pricing of AWS Lambda is reasonable. It's beneficial and cost-effective for users regardless of the number of instances used.

See all answers

Comparisons

Apache Spark vs Apache NiFi

Compared 15% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Apache NiFi

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs Apache NiFi

Compared 10% of the time

Apache Storm vs Apache NiFi

Compared 7% of the time

AWS Batch vs Apache NiFi

Compared 6% of the time

More Apache NiFi Competitors

AWS Batch vs AWS Lambda

Compared 18% of the time

Apache Spark vs AWS Lambda

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs AWS Lambda

Compared 12% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs AWS Lambda

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs AWS Lambda

Compared 7% of the time

More AWS Lambda Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apache NiFi

January 2026

Download Apache NiFi product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda

January 2026

Download AWS Lambda product report

Overview

Apache NiFi is an easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic.

Apache

AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda executes your code only when needed and scales automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With AWS Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. AWS Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring and logging. All you need to do is supply your code in one of the languages that AWS Lambda supports (currently Node.js, Java, C# and Python).

You can use AWS Lambda to run your code in response to events, such as changes to data in an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon DynamoDB table; to run your code in response to HTTP requests using Amazon API Gateway; or invoke your code using API calls made using AWS SDKs. With these capabilities, you can use Lambda to easily build data processing triggers for AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB process streaming data stored in Amazon Kinesis, or create your own back end that operates at AWS scale, performance, and security.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

Macquarie Telecom Group, Dovestech, Slovak Telekom, Looker, Hastings Group

Netflix

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda vs. Apache NiFi

December 2025

Free Report: AWS Lambda vs. Apache NiFi

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lambda vs. Apache NiFi and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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