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Azure Data Factory vs Spring Cloud Data Flow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 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

Azure Data Factory
Ranking in Data Integration
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (3rd)
Spring Cloud Data Flow
Ranking in Data Integration
24th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Azure Data Factory is 9.5%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Cloud Data Flow is 1.1%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Joy Maitra - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless data pipeline creation with good analytics and and thorough monitoring
Azure Data Factory is a low code, no code platform, which is helpful. It provides many prebuilt functionalities that assist in building data pipelines. Also, it facilitates easy transformation with all required functionalities for analytics. Furthermore, it connects to different sources out-of-the-box, making integration much easier. The monitoring is very thorough, though a more readable version would be appreciable.
NitinGoyal - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a plug-and-play model and provides good robustness and scalability
The solution's community support could be improved. I don't know why the Spring Cloud Data Flow community is not very strong. Community support is very limited whenever you face any problem or are stuck somewhere. I'm not sure whether it has improved in the last six months because this pipeline was set up almost two years ago. I struggled with that a lot. For example, there was limited support whenever I got an exception and sought help from Stack Overflow or different forums. Interacting with Kubernetes needs a few certificates. You need to define all the certificates within your application. With the help of those certificates, your Java application or Spring Cloud Data Flow can interact with Kubernetes. I faced a lot of hurdles while placing those certificates. Despite following the official documentation to define all the replicas, readiness, and liveliness probes within the Spring Cloud Data Flow application, it was not working. So, I had to troubleshoot while digging in and debugging the internals of Spring Cloud Data Flow at that time. It was just a configuration mismatch, and I was doing nothing weird. There was a small spelling difference between how Spring Cloud Data Flow was expecting it and how I passed it. I was just following the official documentation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The trigger scheduling options are decently robust."
"From what we have seen so far, the solution seems very stable."
"It makes it easy to collect data from different sources."
"ADF is another ETL tool similar to Informatica that can transform data or copy it from on-prem to the cloud or vice versa. Once we have the data, we can apply various transformations to it and schedule our pipeline according to our business needs. ADF integrates with Databricks. We can call our Databricks notebooks and schedule them via ADF."
"The solution includes a feature that increases the number of processors used which makes it very powerful and adds to the scalability."
"Feature-wise, one of the most valuable ones is the data flows introduced recently in the solution."
"The most valuable feature of Azure Data Factory is that it has a good combination of flexibility, fine-tuning, automation, and good monitoring."
"For developers that are very accustomed to the Microsoft development studio, it's very easy for them to complete end-to-end data integration."
"The ease of deployment on Kubernetes, the seamless integration for orchestration of various pipelines, and the visual dashboard that simplifies operations even for non-specialists such as quality analysts."
"The most valuable feature is real-time streaming."
"The solution's most valuable feature is that it allows us to use different batch data sources, retrieve the data, and then do the data processing, after which we can convert and store it in the target."
"The best thing I like about Spring Cloud Data Flow is its plug-and-play model."
"The product is very user-friendly."
"The dashboards in Spring Cloud Dataflow are quite valuable."
"The most valuable features of Spring Cloud Data Flow are the simple programming model, integration, dependency Injection, and ability to do any injection. Additionally, auto-configuration is another important feature because we don't have to configure the database and or set up the boilerplate in the database in every project. The composability is good, we can create small workloads and compose them in any way we like."
"There are a lot of options in Spring Cloud. It's flexible in terms of how we can use it. It's a full infrastructure."
 

Cons

"The solution should offer better integration with Azure machine learning. We should be able to embed the cognitive services from Microsoft, for example as a web API. It should allow us to embed Azure machine learning in a more user-friendly way."
"We are too early into the entire cycle for us to really comment on what problems we face. We're mostly using it for transformations, like ETL tasks. I think we are comfortable with the facts or the facts setting. But for other parts, it is too early to comment on."
"Areas for improvement in Azure Data Factory include connectivity and integration. When you use integration runtime, whenever there's a failure, the backup process in Azure Data Factory takes time, so this is another area for improvement."
"There are performance issues, particularly with the underlying compute, which should be configurable."
"They require more detailed error reporting, data normalization tools, easier connectivity to other services, more data services, and greater compatibility with other commonly used schemas."
"Data Factory's monitorability could be better."
"Sometimes I need to do some coding, and I'd like to avoid that. I'd like no-code integrations."
"The one element of the solution that we have used and could be improved is the user interface."
"I would improve the dashboard features as they are not very user-friendly."
"The solution's community support could be improved."
"On the tool's online discussion forums, you may get stuck with an issue, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Spring Cloud Data Flow could improve the user interface. We can drag and drop in the application for the configuration and settings, and deploy it right from the UI, without having to run a CI/CD pipeline. However, that does not work with Kubernetes, it only works when we are working with jars as the Spring Cloud Data Flow applications."
"Some of the features, like the monitoring tools, are not very mature and are still evolving."
"There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or refreshing the dashboard."
"Spring Cloud Data Flow is not an easy-to-use tool, so improvements are required."
"The configurations could be better. Some configurations are a little bit time-consuming in terms of trying to understand using the Spring Cloud documentation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is pay-as-you-go or reserve instance. Of the two options, reserve instance is much cheaper."
"My company is on a monthly subscription for Azure Data Factory, but it's more of a pay-as-you-go model where your monthly invoice depends on how many resources you use. On a scale of one to five, pricing for Azure Data Factory is a four. It's just the usage fees my company pays monthly."
"The price is fair."
"Product is priced at the market standard."
"Data Factory is expensive."
"There's no licensing for Azure Data Factory, they have a consumption payment model. How often you are running the service and how long that service takes to run. The price can be approximately $500 to $1,000 per month but depends on the scaling."
"The solution's fees are based on a pay-per-minute use plus the amount of data required to process."
"The pricing is a bit on the higher end."
"If you want support from Spring Cloud Data Flow there is a fee. The Spring Framework is open-source and this is a free solution."
"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."
"The solution provides value for money, and we are currently using its community edition."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?
AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.
How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica PowerCenter?
Azure Data Factory is flexible, modular, and works well. In terms of cost, it is not too pricey. It offers the stability and reliability I am looking for, good scalability, and is easy to set up an...
How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica Cloud Data Integration?
Azure Data Factory is a solid product offering many transformation functions; It has pre-load and post-load transformations, allowing users to apply transformations either in code by using Power Q...
What needs improvement with Spring Cloud Data Flow?
There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or r...
What is your primary use case for Spring Cloud Data Flow?
We had a project for content management, which involved multiple applications each handling content ingestion, transformation, enrichment, and storage for different customers independently. We want...
What advice do you have for others considering Spring Cloud Data Flow?
I would definitely recommend Spring Cloud Data Flow. It requires minimal additional effort or time to understand how it works, and even non-specialists can use it effectively with its friendly docu...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Adobe 2. BMW 3. Coca-Cola 4. General Electric 5. Johnson & Johnson 6. LinkedIn 7. Mastercard 8. Nestle 9. Pfizer 10. Samsung 11. Siemens 12. Toyota 13. Unilever 14. Verizon 15. Walmart 16. Accenture 17. American Express 18. AT&T 19. Bank of America 20. Cisco 21. Deloitte 22. ExxonMobil 23. Ford 24. General Motors 25. IBM 26. JPMorgan Chase 27. Microsoft (Azure Data Factory is developed by Microsoft) 28. Oracle 29. Procter & Gamble 30. Salesforce 31. Shell 32. Visa
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Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Data Factory vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
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