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Apache Spark Streaming vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
17
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
20
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 Spark Streaming is 4.7%, up from 3.7% 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
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Spark Streaming4.7%
PubSub+ Platform3.9%
Other91.4%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Himansu Jena - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Project Manager at Raj Subhatech
Efficient real-time data management and analysis with advanced features
There are various ways we can improve Apache Spark Streaming through best practices. The initial part requires attention to batch interval tuning, which helps small intervals in micro batches based on latency requirements and helps prevent back pressure. We can use data formats such as Parquet or ORC for storage that needs faster reads and leveraging feature predicate push-down optimizations. We can implement serialization which helps with any Kyro in terms of .NET or Java. We have boxing and unboxing serialization for XML and JSON for converting key-pair values stored in browser. We can also implement caching mechanisms for storing and recomputing multiple operations. We can use specified joins which help with smaller databases, and distributed joins can minimize users. We can implement project optimization memory for CPU efficiency, known as Tungsten. Additionally, load balancing, checkpointing, and schema evaluation are areas to consider based on performance and bottlenecks. We can use Bugzilla tools for tracking and Splunk to monitor the performance of process systems, utilization, and performance based on data frames or data sets.
Deepankar Bbhowmick - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It is the most scalable tool that I have seen before."
"With Apache Spark Streaming's integration with Anaconda and Miniconda with Python, I interact with databases using data frames or data sets in micro versions and create solutions based on business expectations for decision-making, logistic regression, linear regression, or machine learning which provides image or voice record and graphical data for improved accuracy."
"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's capabilities for machine learning are quite extensive and can be used in a low-code way."
"I appreciate Apache Spark Streaming's micro-batching capabilities; the watermarking functionality and related features are quite good."
"Apache Spark Streaming is versatile. You can use it for competitive intelligence, gathering data from competitors, or for internal tasks like monitoring workflows."
"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."
"The best features of PubSub+ Platform include being highly scalable, allowing us to handle billions and billions of events, and configuring and managing PubSub+ Platform is straightforward and simple while being highly reliable."
"If we talk about Solace, you see the value-add layer; I can say that Solace is a basic Kafka, but on top of that Kafka layer, they have added their own layer that is really good, as this is where it adds value and why we went for it."
"The best features of PubSub+ Platform are its real-time simulation, real-time event data streaming, and integration with any IoT applications."
"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."
"It is a product that is more like a switch or router, where you install it, then it keeps on working."
"Solace has been incident free in HA deployment for seven years."
"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 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."
 

Cons

"When dealing with various data types including COBOL, Excel, JSON, video, audio, and MPG files, challenges can arise with incomplete or missing values."
"We would like to have the ability to do arbitrary stateful functions in Python."
"We don't have enough experience to be judgmental about its flaws."
"Integrating event-level streaming capabilities could be beneficial."
"The initial setup is quite complex."
"The cost and load-related optimizations are areas where the tool lacks and needs improvement."
"There could be an improvement in the area of the user configuration section, it should be less developer-focused and more business user-focused."
"One improvement I would expect is real-time processing instead of micro-batch or near real-time."
"For small-sized enterprises, it may be a higher cost, or they may be looking for other options."
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."
"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."
"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."
"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."
"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 price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"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 the solution is expensive."
"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise15
 

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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

Spark Streaming
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

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 
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark Streaming vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.