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Apache Spark Streaming vs Redpanda comparison

 

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
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Redpanda
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Spark Streaming is 4.7%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Redpanda is 2.0%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Redpanda2.0%
Apache Spark Streaming4.7%
Other93.3%
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.
ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Analyst at CLSA
Event streaming has simplified video data cleanup and now powers real-time analytics
One area for improvement is providing more examples. For instance, Redpanda could be more useful as a sink where you get the data and can directly push to S3. While this is possible through the API, there are better and faster ways to do it. You can make a million API calls and accomplish the task in one and a half hours, but the same thing can be done in ten minutes through other methods. These faster approaches are not documented in obvious places. You have to find information scattered across various blogs. Redpanda should collect all the good blogs and best practices and put them in their documentation. This is more about knowledge management and making it easy for users to understand the product for complex use cases. For simple use cases, it is straightforward. We all use the basic pipe functionality. However, providing more examples would be useful. For example, integration with AWS and the AWS ecosystem would be cool.

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."
"The platform’s most valuable feature for processing real-time data is its ability to handle continuous data streams."
"It is the most scalable tool that I have seen before."
"It's the fastest solution on the market with low latency data on data transformations."
"With Apache Spark Streaming, you can have multiple kinds of windows; depending on your use case, you can select either a tumbling window, a sliding window, or a static window to determine how much data you want to process at a single point of time."
"Apache Spark's capabilities for machine learning are quite extensive and can be used in a low-code way."
"As an open-source solution, using it is basically free."
"Apache Spark Streaming has features like checkpointing and Streaming API that are useful."
"The good part about Redpanda is that there is a free part, which is great, and it is embedding most Kafka features so you have a number of features similar to Confluent but for free, which is great."
"Redpanda has positively impacted my organization by being easy to implement quickly for use cases such as the implementation of MVPs and PoCs, making scalability, tolerance, and availability very interesting and facilitating the provisioning of infrastructure efficiently."
"The performance is superb, and the value we are getting for the money we pay is great."
"I do want to mention that there was a part of Redpanda where you can configure and create containers with Docker."
"Through a lot of benchmarks and whatnot, we found out that on a larger scale, when the latency of the messages is important, not talking about throughput, the latency is important, Redpanda offers a way better latency profile than Apache Kafka."
"Redpanda was simple and fast, so we went with Redpanda and it just works."
"What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++, which is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications."
"Aside from its lightweight design, Redpanda is essentially a clone of Kafka with all the good features of Kafka, with the only difference being that Kafka needs too many resources while Redpanda is a very good, lightweight, and very fast database."
 

Cons

"The solution itself could be easier to use."
"Integrating event-level streaming capabilities could be beneficial."
"When dealing with various data types including COBOL, Excel, JSON, video, audio, and MPG files, challenges can arise with incomplete or missing values."
"The debugging aspect could use some improvement."
"We would like to have the ability to do arbitrary stateful functions in Python."
"The service structure of Apache Spark Streaming can improve. There are a lot of issues with memory management and latency. There is no real-time analytics. We recommend it for the use cases where there is a five-second latency, but not for a millisecond, an IOT-based, or the detection anomaly-based. Flink as a service is much better."
"The downside is when you have this the other way around in the columns, it becomes really hard to use."
"We don't have enough experience to be judgmental about its flaws."
"Redpanda is not the best technology available on the market."
"Redpanda can be improved in several ways, and the more I experiment with the product, the more limitations I find."
"Redpanda can be improved as the support they provide for BYOC could be better."
"For me, I was trying to get a lot of data, but I would only get one day's worth of data, even though I asked how I could increase the retention size."
"Redpanda needs more visibility and primarily greater access to documentation."
"One issue I had with Redpanda was debugging an issue where our API would stall whenever we output to our API, and I was not seeing anything in the logs explaining why it was taking a long time."
"In Redpanda, the areas that have room for improvement are in the clustering part."
"Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"It's free. Everybody can use it, only support is paid."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Educational Organization
8%
Computer Software 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 Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
 

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 Redpanda?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Redpanda, I am exploring the product. If I am convinced about the product and the capabilities, and I am sure I will be because I...
What needs improvement with Redpanda?
Redpanda can be improved in several ways, and the more I experiment with the product, the more limitations I find. I understand that this is about business, and the product should grow, and they ha...
What is your primary use case for Redpanda?
My main use case for Redpanda is primarily for streaming, and I am currently focusing on building data lakehouses because I find them really interesting. Redpanda fits into my data lakehouse setup ...
 

Also Known As

Spark Streaming
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, eBay Inc.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark Streaming vs. Redpanda and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.