Apache Spark Streaming vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Apache and Solace are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Apache is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.9, while Solace is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.6. Apache holds a 4.6% mindshare in SA, compared to Solace’s 3.9% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Solace users who would recommend it.

Apache Spark Streaming

Read 17 Apache Spark Streaming reviews

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2,888 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Read 20 PubSub+ Platform reviews

5,425 Views
2,279 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Apache Spark Streaming

PubSub+ Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Apache Spark Streaming and PubSub+ Platform compete in the data processing and messaging space. While Apache Spark Streaming's pricing can be a draw for budget-conscious buyers, PubSub+ Platform's advanced features appeal to enterprises with complex needs, often justifying its higher cost.

Features: Apache Spark Streaming supports batch processing, sophisticated analytics, and integrations with various Apache projects, making it well-suited for data-intensive applications. PubSub+ Platform excels with event-driven architecture support, dynamic scaling, and real-time event streaming, enhancing agility and responsiveness.

Room for Improvement: Apache Spark Streaming could improve its ease of setup and scalability options. Enhancements in native support for various data sources and better community support tools could also benefit users. PubSub+ Platform might work on simplifying its user interface further and decreasing the complexity of topic hierarchy management. It could also benefit from offering more straightforward documentation and reducing the learning curve for new users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Apache Spark Streaming can require substantial resources and expertise for deployment due to its complex architecture, while PubSub+ Platform offers a more streamlined deployment with a user-friendly interface and better customer service. PubSub+ is often praised for responsive support, contrasting with Apache Spark Streaming's reliance on community-driven support.

Pricing and ROI: Apache Spark Streaming typically offers lower setup costs, attractive for businesses with limited budgets. It leverages open-source resources to decrease long-term costs, contributing to its ROI. PubSub+ Platform demands higher upfront and ongoing costs but offers substantial ROI through its operational efficiencies and reduced application time-to-market, making it worthwhile for organizations focused on advanced event streaming capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Apache Spark Streaming vs. PubSub+ Platform Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Apache Spark Streaming 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 Spark Streaming

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

8th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

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

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (7th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Spark Streaming is 4.6%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 3.9%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Apache Spark Streaming	4.6%
PubSub+ Platform	3.9%
Other	91.5%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Khoa Dang Le

Principal AI Engineer at IMT Solutions

Have faced challenges with complex data handling and seek smoother integration for machine learning workflows

I find the fault tolerance feature beneficial because I use it for serving data from a landing area. I understand all of the structures we have for Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, and MLlib. The ability of Apache Spark Streaming to handle out-of-order data using watermarking and windowing is something we use in our pipeline. Nearly 50% of our usage is based on that because we use it for landing data, and we appreciate that we can work with it. The main benefits of Apache Spark Streaming include cost savings, time savings, and efficiency improvements about data storage. The fast storage capability is crucial because Apache Spark replaces Hadoop's MapReduce, allowing us to manage our data more efficiently.

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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.

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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

"For Apache Spark Streaming, the feature I appreciated most is that it provides live data delivery; additionally, it provides the capability to send a larger amount of data in parallel."

"Apache Spark Streaming's most valuable feature is near real-time analytics. The developers can build APIs easily for a code-steaming pipeline. The solutions have an ecosystem of integration with other stock services."

"Apache Spark Streaming is versatile. You can use it for competitive intelligence, gathering data from competitors, or for internal tasks like monitoring workflows."

"The main benefits of Apache Spark Streaming include cost savings, time savings, and efficiency improvements about data storage."

"The solution is better than average and some of the valuable features include efficiency and stability."

"The platform’s most valuable feature for processing real-time data is its ability to handle continuous data streams."

"By integrating Apache Spark Streaming, the data freshness rate, and latency have significantly improved from 24-hour batch processing to less than one minute, facilitating faster communication to downstream systems, aiding marketing campaigns."

"Apache Spark Streaming was straightforward in terms of maintenance. It was actively developed, and migrating from an older to a newer version was quite simple."

More Apache Spark Streaming pros

"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable."

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

"I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10."

"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."

"Going from something where we had outages and capacity issues constantly to a system that was able to scale with the massive market data and messaging spikes that happened during the initial stages of the COVID crisis in March, we were able to scale with 40 plus percent growth in our platform over the course of days."

"The most useful features has been the WAN optimization and probably the HybridEdge, which requires some third-party adapters or plugins. The idea that we can position Solace as a protocol-agnostic message transport fabric is key to our company having all manners of asynchronous messaging protocols from MQ, Kafka, JMS, etc. I really like the WAN optimization: Send once over a WAN, then distribute locally as many times as there are subscribers."

"The valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the speed of processing, publishing, and consumption."

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

More PubSub+ Platform pros

Cons

"The problem is we need to use it in a certain manner. After that, we need to apply another pipeline for the machine learning processes, and that's what we work on."

"The initial setup is quite complex."

"The cost and load-related optimizations are areas where the tool lacks and needs improvement."

"We would like to have the ability to do arbitrary stateful functions in Python."

"The debugging aspect could use some improvement."

"In terms of improvement, the UI could be better."

"The solution itself could be easier to use."

"While it is reliable, there are some issues with Apache Spark Streaming as it is not 100% reliable."

More Apache Spark Streaming 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."

"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."

"For small-sized enterprises, it may be a higher cost, or they may be looking for other options."

"Some improvement is required with Solace professional services. The professional services really needs to drive the solutions for the customers and share best practices."

"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?"

"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 struggled in a sort of perpetual PoC mode internally."

"Additional in-line information about certain things on PubSub+ Platform could be more beneficial for new users who are just starting to use this technology."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."

"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive, or not cost-effective, and ten is cheap, I rate the price a seven."

"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Outsourcing Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Apache Spark Streaming?

One of the improvements we need is in Spark SQL and the machine learning library. I don't think there is too much to work on, but the issue is when we want to use machine learning, we always need t...

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What is your primary use case for Apache Spark Streaming?

We work with Apache Spark Streaming for our project because we use that as one of the landing data sources, and we work with it to ensure we can get all of the data before it goes through our data ...

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What advice do you have for others considering Apache Spark Streaming?

One thing I would share with other organizations considering Apache Spark Streaming is the necessity of having effective data storage. We want to ensure we acquire and manage our data storage effec...

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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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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apache Spark Streaming

September 2026

Download Apache Spark Streaming product report

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

September 2026

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Also Known As

Spark Streaming

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

Overview

Apache Spark Streaming efficiently processes real-time data with features like micro-batching and native Python support. It's scalable and integrates with many services, ideal for reducing data latency and enabling real-time analytics across industries.

Apache Spark Streaming is a powerful tool for real-time data processing and analytics, offering support for multiple languages and robust integration capabilities. Its open-source nature, combined with features like checkpointing and watermarking, makes it a reliable choice for managing data streams with low latency. However, it faces challenges with Kubernetes deployments and requires improvements in memory management and latency. The installation process and handling of structured and unstructured data also present complexities. Despite these challenges, it's heavily utilized in building data pipelines and leveraging machine learning algorithms.

What are Apache Spark Streaming's key features?

Native Python Support: Efficient processing with Python language integration.
Micro-Batching: Handles streams in small batches for real-time processing.
Real-Time Analytics: Enables instant data insights.
Scalability: Adapts to varying data loads.
Low Latency: Processes data with minimal delays.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

Efficiency: Streamlined real-time data processing.
Reliability: Consistent performance across tasks.
Integration: Seamless connection with other services.
Cost Optimization: Reduces processing expenses over time.

In industries like healthcare, telecommunications, and logistics, Apache Spark Streaming is implemented for real-time data processing and machine learning. It aids in predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and fraud detection by reducing data latency with comprehensive analytics. Organizations frequently use it alongside Kafka and cloud storage solutions to enhance GIS, predictive analytics, and Customer 360 profiling.

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

UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, eBay 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 Spark Streaming vs. PubSub+ Platform

September 2026

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