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Apache Flink vs PubSub+ Platform 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 Flink
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PubSub+ Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Message Queue (MQ) Software (6th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Flink is 12.6%, up from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 2.9%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Ilya Afanasyev - PeerSpot reviewer
A great solution with an intricate system and allows for batch data processing
We value this solution's intricate system because it comes with a state inside the mechanism and product. The system allows us to process batch data, stream to real-time and build pipelines. Additionally, we do not need to process data from the beginning when we pause, and we can continue from the same point where we stopped. It helps us save time as 95% of our pipelines will now be on Amazon, and we'll save money by saving time.
BhanuChidigam - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs well, high availability, and helpful support
We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Allows us to process batch data, stream to real-time and build pipelines."
"Apache Flink allows you to reduce latency and process data in real-time, making it ideal for such scenarios."
"Apache Flink offers a range of powerful configurations and experiences for development teams. Its strength lies in its development experience and capabilities."
"With Flink, it provides out-of-the-box checkpointing and state management. It helps us in that way. When Storm used to restart, sometimes we would lose messages. With Flink, it provides guaranteed message processing, which helped us. It also helped us with maintenance or restarts."
"The setup was not too difficult."
"Easy to deploy and manage."
"It provides us the flexibility to deploy it on any cluster without being constrained by cloud-based limitations."
"The event processing function is the most useful or the most used function. The filter function and the mapping function are also very useful because we have a lot of data to transform. For example, we store a lot of information about a person, and when we want to retrieve this person's details, we need all the details. In the map function, we can actually map all persons based on their age group. That's why the mapping function is very useful. We can really get a lot of events, and then we keep on doing what we need to do."
"When we went to add another installation in our private cloud, it was easy. We received support from Solace and the install was seamless with no issues."
"The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features."
"When it comes to granularity, you can literally do anything regarding how the filtering works."
"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."
"We've built a lot of products into it and it's been quite easy to feed market data onto the systems and put entitlements and controls around that. That was a big win for us when we were consolidating our platforms down. Trying to have one event bus, one messaging bus, for the whole globe, and consolidate everything over time, has been key for us. We've been able to do that through one API, even if it's across the different languages."
"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."
"Some valuable features include reconnecting topics, placing queues, and direct connections to MongoDB. The platform provides a dashboard to monitor the status of messages, such as how many have been processed or delivered, which is helpful for tracking performance."
"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the initial setup process."
"The state maintains checkpoints and they use RocksDB or S3. They are good but sometimes the performance is affected when you use RocksDB for checkpointing."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"We have a machine learning team that works with Python, but Apache Flink does not have full support for the language."
"Apache Flink should improve its data capability and data migration."
"In terms of improvement, there should be better reporting. You can integrate with reporting solutions but Flink doesn't offer it themselves."
"Apache Flink's documentation should be available in more languages."
"There are more libraries that are missing and also maybe more capabilities for machine learning."
"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."
"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."
"The product should allow third-party agents to be installed. Currently, it is quite proprietary."
"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."
"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."
"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."
"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Apache Flink is open source so we pay no licensing for the use of the software."
"It's an open-source solution."
"This is an open-source platform that can be used free of charge."
"It's an open source."
"The solution is open-source, which is free."
"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."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"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 price of the solution is expensive."
"The pricing and licensing were very transparent and well-communicated by our account manager."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache Flink?
The product helps us to create both simple and complex data processing tasks. Over time, it has facilitated integration and navigation across multiple data sources tailored to each client's needs. ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Flink?
The solution is expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Apache Flink?
There are more libraries that are missing and also maybe more capabilities for machine learning. It could have a friendly user interface for pipeline configuration, deployment, and monitoring.
What do you like most about PubSub+ Event Broker?
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.
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively. Additionally, providing a comprehensive dashboard t...
 

Also Known As

Flink
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

LogRhythm, Inc., Inter-American Development Bank, Scientific Technologies Corporation, LotLinx, Inc., Benevity, 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 Flink vs. PubSub+ Platform and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
841,152 professionals have used our research since 2012.