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Apache Flink VS Kafka Streams

Compare Apache Flink VS Kafka Streams and see what are their differences

Apache Flink logo Apache Flink

Flink is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations.

Kafka Streams logo Kafka Streams

Apache Kafka: A Distributed Streaming Platform.
  • Apache Flink Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03
  • Kafka Streams Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-21

Apache Flink features and specs

  • Real-time Stream Processing
    Apache Flink is designed for real-time data streaming, offering low-latency processing capabilities that are essential for applications requiring immediate data insights.
  • Event Time Processing
    Flink supports event time processing, which allows it to handle out-of-order events effectively and provide accurate results based on the time events actually occurred rather than when they were processed.
  • State Management
    Flink provides robust state management features, making it easier to maintain and query state across distributed nodes, which is crucial for managing long-running applications.
  • Fault Tolerance
    The framework includes built-in mechanisms for fault tolerance, such as consistent checkpoints and savepoints, ensuring high reliability and data consistency even in the case of failures.
  • Scalability
    Apache Flink is highly scalable, capable of handling both batch and stream processing workloads across a distributed cluster, making it suitable for large-scale data processing tasks.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    Flink has a rich set of APIs and integrations with other big data tools, such as Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Cassandra, enhancing its versatility and ease of integration into existing data pipelines.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Flink

  • Complexity
    Flink’s advanced features and capabilities come with a steep learning curve, making it more challenging to set up and use compared to simpler stream processing frameworks.
  • Resource Intensive
    The framework can be resource-intensive, requiring substantial memory and CPU resources for optimal performance, which might be a concern for smaller setups or cost-sensitive environments.
  • Community Support
    While growing, the community around Apache Flink is not as large or mature as some other big data frameworks like Apache Spark, potentially limiting the availability of community-contributed resources and support.
  • Ecosystem Maturity
    Despite its integrations, the Flink ecosystem is still maturing, and certain tools and plugins may not be as developed or stable as those available for more established frameworks.
  • Operational Overhead
    Running and maintaining a Flink cluster can involve significant operational overhead, including monitoring, scaling, and troubleshooting, which might require a dedicated team or additional expertise.

Kafka Streams features and specs

  • Scalability
    Kafka Streams is designed to scale horizontally, allowing you to handle large volumes of data by distributing processing across multiple nodes.
  • Integration with Kafka
    Kafka Streams is part of the Apache Kafka ecosystem, providing seamless integration with Kafka topics for both input and output, simplifying data pipeline creation.
  • Exactly-once semantics
    Kafka Streams offers exactly-once processing semantics, which ensures data consistency and accuracy in scenarios where data duplication or loss is unacceptable.
  • Microservices Architecture
    It supports microservices architecture by allowing developers to build lightweight stream processing applications that are easy to deploy and manage.
  • Stateful and Stateless Processing
    Supports both stateful (requiring state storage and access) and stateless processing, providing flexibility in stream processing capabilities.
  • Fault Tolerant
    Kafka Streams is designed to be fault-tolerant, automatically recovering from failures and resuming processing without data loss.

Possible disadvantages of Kafka Streams

  • Complexity
    Setting up and configuring Kafka Streams can be complex, requiring a good understanding of Apache Kafka, stream processing principles, and application logic.
  • Resource Intensive
    Kafka Streams can be resource-intensive, demanding sufficient CPU and memory resources, especially when dealing with high-volume data streams.
  • Java Specific
    Primarily designed for Java applications, which may limit its ease of use for teams or projects that are based in other programming languages.
  • Limited UI Tools
    Lacks advanced UI tools for monitoring and managing stream applications, which can make it challenging for users to oversee and troubleshoot applications.
  • Slow Start-up Time
    Kafka Streams applications can have relatively slow start-up times, which might impact scenarios requiring quick deployment and scaling.

Apache Flink videos

GOTO 2019 • Introduction to Stateful Stream Processing with Apache Flink • Robert Metzger

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Apache Flink Tutorial | Flink vs Spark | Real Time Analytics Using Flink | Apache Flink Training
  • Tutorial - How to build a modern stream processor: The science behind Apache Flink - Stefan Richter

Kafka Streams videos

Spark Streaming Vs Kafka Streams || Which is The Best for Stream Processing?

More videos:

  • Review - Big Data Analytics in Near-Real-Time with Apache Kafka Streams - Allen Underwood
  • Review - Spring Tips: Spring Cloud Stream Kafka Streams

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache Flink and Kafka Streams)
Big Data
83 83%
17% 17
Stream Processing
75 75%
25% 25
Databases
81 81%
19% 19
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Flink should be more popular than Kafka Streams. It has been mentiond 40 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apache Flink mentions (40)

  • Is RisingWave the Next Apache Flink?
    Apache Flink, known initially as Stratosphere, is a distributed stream processing engine initiated by a group of researchers at TU Berlin. Since its initial release in May 2011, Flink has gained immense popularity in both academia and industry. And it is currently the most well-known streaming system globally (challenge me if you think I got it wrong!). - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • Every Database Will Support Iceberg — Here's Why
    Apache Iceberg defines a table format that separates how data is stored from how data is queried. Any engine that implements the Iceberg integration — Spark, Flink, Trino, DuckDB, Snowflake, RisingWave — can read and/or write Iceberg data directly. - Source: dev.to / 17 days ago
  • RisingWave Turns Four: Our Journey Beyond Democratizing Stream Processing
    The last decade saw the rise of open-source frameworks like Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, and Apache Samza. These offered more flexibility but still demanded significant engineering muscle to run effectively at scale. Companies using them often needed specialized stream processing engineers just to manage internal state, tune performance, and handle the day-to-day operational challenges. The barrier to entry... - Source: dev.to / 22 days ago
  • Twitter's 600-Tweet Daily Limit Crisis: Soaring GCP Costs and the Open Source Fix Elon Musk Ignored
    Apache Flink: Flink is a unified streaming and batching platform developed under the Apache Foundation. It provides support for Java API and a SQL interface. Flink boasts a large ecosystem and can seamlessly integrate with various services, including Kafka, Pulsar, HDFS, Iceberg, Hudi, and other systems. - Source: dev.to / 30 days ago
  • Exploring the Power and Community Behind Apache Flink
    In conclusion, Apache Flink is more than a big data processing tool—it is a thriving ecosystem that exemplifies the power of open source collaboration. From its impressive technical capabilities to its innovative funding model, Apache Flink shows that sustainable software development is possible when community, corporate support, and transparency converge. As industries continue to demand efficient real-time data... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
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Kafka Streams mentions (14)

  • Top 10 Common Data Engineers and Scientists Pain Points in 2024
    Data scientists often prefer Python for its simplicity and powerful libraries like Pandas or SciPy. However, many real-time data processing tools are Java-based. Take the example of Kafka, Flink, or Spark streaming. While these tools have their Python API/wrapper libraries, they introduce increased latency, and data scientists need to manage dependencies for both Python and JVM environments. For example,... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Forward Compatible Enum Values in API with Java Jackson
    We’re not discussing the technical details behind the deduplication process. It could be Apache Flink, Apache Spark, or Kafka Streams. Anyway, it’s out of the scope of this article. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Kafka Internals - Learn kafka in-depth (Part-1)
    In pub-sub systems, you cannot have multiple services to consume the same data because the messages are deleted after being consumed by one consumer. Whereas in Kafka, you can have multiple services to consume. This opens the door to a lot of opportunities such as Kafka streams, Kafka connect. We’ll discuss these at the end of the series. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Event streaming in .Net with Kafka
    Internally, Streamiz use the .Net client for Apache Kafka released by Confluent and try to provide the same features than Kafka Streams. There is gap between these two library, but the trend is decreasing after each release. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Apache Pulsar vs Apache Kafka - How to choose a data streaming platform
    Both Kafka and Pulsar provide some kind of stream processing capability, but Kafka is much further along in that regard. Pulsar stream processing relies on the Pulsar Functions interface which is only suited for simple callbacks. On the other hand, Kafka Streams and ksqlDB are more complete solutions that could be considered replacements for Apache Spark or Apache Flink, state-of-the-art stream-processing... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Flink and Kafka Streams, you can also consider the following products

Apache Spark - Apache Spark is an engine for big data processing, with built-in modules for streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing.

Apache Kafka - Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.

Amazon Kinesis - Amazon Kinesis services make it easy to work with real-time streaming data in the AWS cloud.

Apache Storm - Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system.

Spring Framework - The Spring Framework provides a comprehensive programming and configuration model for modern Java-based enterprise applications - on any kind of deployment platform.

Apache NiFi - An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data.