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Apache NiFi vs IBM Streams comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 NiFi
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Compute Service (5th)
IBM Streams
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Apache NiFi and IBM Streams aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Apache NiFi is designed for Compute Service and holds a mindshare of 7.4%, down 9.3% compared to last year.
IBM Streams, on the other hand, focuses on Streaming Analytics, holds 2.1% mindshare, up 1.0% since last year.
Compute Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache NiFi7.4%
Amazon EC214.9%
AWS Lambda14.7%
Other63.0%
Compute Service
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Streams2.1%
Databricks7.4%
Apache Flink7.0%
Other83.5%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

YV
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.
Ahmed_Emad - PeerSpot reviewer
Territory Sales Leader at Sumerge
A solution for data pipelines but has connector limitations
We have used Kafka for seven years. IBM streams gives you many OOTB features that can boost the time-to-market, especially when it comes to reporting and monitoring for example. Confluent is recognized as one of the leaders in this space and the main reason for this is related to the complete vision of the platform also the large number of connectors. This gives the edge and competitive advatnage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Apache NiFi is the heart of data ingestion for the entire platform and tremendously makes the platform reliable and useful for customers without crossing any SLAs."
"It is highly effective for handling real-time data by working with APIs for immediate and continuous data extraction."
"The most valuable features of this solution are ease of use and implementation."
"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."
"NiFi allows us to organize our ingestion as the directed graphs and provides a useful GUI, that can be used to configure the system and monitor data flows."
"NiFi works on data and file levels, streamlining real-time data processes."
"It's very handy, I like building the independent flow, an automated flow where you can build a flow from source to destination, then do the transformation in between."
"Speeding up projects with Apache NiFi has helped the organization by resulting in cost savings, and a 30% reduction in cost was noticed as a specific metric regarding those savings."
"The product has enabled us to create solutions to client problems that would have either been impossible or very expensive/difficult using other technologies."
"Easy development and deployment, Java implementation features, and the real time analyser and alarm function are the most valuable features for us."
"The OEM Solution (Excel-medical.com) running on top of IBM Streams provides real-time clinical algorithms that can give better insight into the patient's acuity, thus cutting off time to discharge patients and inversely making sure that sick patients don't get discharged until ready."
"As a result, the TELCO company was able to cut down the time it took to respond to customer needs and there were fewer complaints."
 

Cons

"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."
"The use case templates could be more precise to typical business needs."
"I would suggest continuous improvements regarding the custom developer-built processors, as many times the errors that arise are not useful."
"The product is stable for simple tasks, like using databases that are not distributed. However, for distributed environments like Hadoop or HBase, some vulnerabilities exist."
"The quality of JSON data processing could be improved, as JSON workloads require manual conversions without a specific process."
"As I mentioned, it lacks organization, so when we scale out, we want a tool that is organized better than Apache NiFi."
"There are some claims that NiFi is cloud-native but we have tested it, and it's not."
"The tool should incorporate more tutorials for advanced use cases. It has tutorials for simple use cases."
"The price and versatility of this product need to improve - it is not inexpensive."
"I’d like to see a tool kit specifically targeted at incremental machine learning. It’s already great for scoring previously trained models, but dynamically updating models is currently more of a 'grow your own' kind of thing."
"The development IDE sometimes crashes and freezes."
"We had some stability issues where we used embedded Zookeeper in production."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an open-source solution."
"We use the free version of Apache NiFi."
"I used the tool's free version."
"The solution is open-source."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Government
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise17
No data available
 

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 ...
What needs improvement with Apache NiFi?
Adding transformation capabilities is crucial. Apache NiFi is very powerful at ingestion but it needs to be powerful also at the transformation part. We don't use it for the transformation part and...
What is your primary use case for Apache NiFi?
Apache NiFi is mainly used for data ingestion only, functioning as an extraction tool to extract and load data. It is not particularly strong at the transformation part, but it excels at the ingest...
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
IBM InfoSphere Streams
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Macquarie Telecom Group, Dovestech, Slovak Telekom, Looker, Hastings Group
Globo TV, All England Lawn Tennis Club, CenterPoint Energy, Consolidated Communications Holdings, Darwin Ecosystem, Emory University Hospital, ICICI Securities, Irish Centre for Fetal and Neonatal Translational Research (INFANT), Living Roads, Mobileum, Optibus, Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP), University of Alberta, University of Montana, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Wimbledon 2015
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