Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Confluent VS Spring Cloud Data Flow

Compare Confluent VS Spring Cloud Data Flow and see what are their differences

Confluent logo Confluent

Confluent offers a real-time data platform built around Apache Kafka.

Spring Cloud Data Flow logo Spring Cloud Data Flow

Spring Cloud Data Flow is a platform capable of stream and batch data pipelines having the tools to create delicate topologies.
  • Confluent Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-22
  • Spring Cloud Data Flow Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-30

Confluent features and specs

  • Scalability
    Confluent is built on Apache Kafka, which allows for smooth scalability to handle growing data needs without significant performance degradation.
  • Real-Time Data Processing
    Confluent enables real-time streaming data processing, which is beneficial for applications requiring immediate data insights and actions.
  • Comprehensive Ecosystem
    Confluent provides a rich set of tools and connectors that integrate seamlessly with various data sources and sinks, making it easier to build and manage data pipelines.
  • Ease of Use
    Confluent offers an intuitive user interface and comprehensive documentation, which simplifies the setup and management of Kafka clusters.
  • Managed Service Option
    Confluent Cloud provides a fully managed Kafka service, reducing the operational burden on the engineering team and allowing businesses to focus on developing applications.
  • Advanced Security Features
    Confluent offers robust security features including encryption, SSL, ACLs, and more, ensuring that data streams are protected.
  • Strong Customer Support
    Confluent offers professional support and consultancy services which can be very helpful for enterprises requiring 24/7 support and expertise.

Possible disadvantages of Confluent

  • Cost
    Confluent can be expensive, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. The costs can grow significantly with scale and additional enterprise features.
  • Complexity
    Despite its ease of use, the underlying systemโ€™s complexity can pose a challenge, particularly for teams who are new to Kafka or streaming data technologies.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running Confluent on-premises can be resource-intensive, requiring significant computational and storage resources to maintain optimal performance.
  • Learning Curve
    For those unfamiliar with Kafka and streaming technologies, there is a steep learning curve which can lead to longer implementation times.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Utilizing Confluentโ€™s proprietary tools and connectors can result in vendor lock-in, making it difficult to switch to alternative solutions without considerable effort and reconfiguration.
  • Dependency on Cloud Provider
    If using Confluent Cloud, dependency on the cloud providerโ€™s infrastructure may introduce compliance and control limitations, particularly for businesses with strict data sovereignty requirements.

Spring Cloud Data Flow features and specs

  • Scalability
    Spring Cloud Data Flow allows for the deployment of data processing pipelines that can scale horizontally, aiding in the management of big data workloads by dynamically allocating resources.
  • Ease of Use
    The framework provides a user-friendly interface and pre-built connectors, making it easier for developers to create, deploy, and manage complex data pipelines without needing extensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure.
  • Integration
    Spring Cloud Data Flow seamlessly integrates with the Spring ecosystem, making it easier for developers already using Spring technologies to adopt the framework and integrate it with existing applications.
  • Flexibility
    The framework supports both streaming and batch data processing, giving developers the flexibility to handle various data processing scenarios with the same framework.
  • Managed Deployments
    It provides options for deploying on a variety of cloud platforms, such as Kubernetes, enabling managed and consistent deployments across different environments.

Possible disadvantages of Spring Cloud Data Flow

  • Complexity
    While designed to simplify data workflows, the framework can introduce complexity when configuring pipelines and integrations, especially for new users or those with limited experience in distributed systems.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running extensive data processing pipelines can be resource-intensive, potentially leading to higher costs and the need for significant infrastructure, especially for large-scale applications.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its ease of use, there is a learning curve associated with understanding the system's architecture and the best practices for deploying and managing data workflows effectively.
  • Limited Vendor Support
    Though it integrates well with other Spring projects, there might be limited support for third-party tools and services outside the Spring ecosystem, which could limit flexibility in some use cases.
  • Overhead
    The abstraction layers and orchestration capabilities might add overhead, which could impact performance in scenarios demanding highly optimized, low-latency processing.

Confluent videos

1. Intro | Monitoring Kafka in Confluent Control Center

More videos:

  • Review - Jason Gustafson, Confluent: Revisiting Exactly One Semantics (EOS) | Bay Area Apache Kafkaยฎ Meetup
  • Review - CLEARER SKIN AFTER 1 USEโ€ผ๏ธ| Ancient Cosmetics Updateโœจ| CONFLUENT & RETICULATED PAPILLOMATOSIS CURE?๐Ÿ˜ฉ

Spring Cloud Data Flow videos

Orchestrate All the Things! with Spring Cloud Data Flow - Eric Bottard & Ilayaperumal Gopinathan

More videos:

  • Review - Demo: Partitioning Batch jobs with Spring Cloud Data Flow & Task
  • Demo - 3 min demo: Spring Cloud Data Flow Metrics

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Confluent and Spring Cloud Data Flow)
Big Data
79 79%
21% 21
Stream Processing
83 83%
17% 17
Data Management
81 81%
19% 19
Business & Commerce
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Confluent and Spring Cloud Data Flow. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Spring Cloud Data Flow might be a bit more popular than Confluent. We know about 1 link to it since March 2021 and only 1 link to Confluent. 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.

Confluent mentions (1)

  • Spring Boot Event Streaming with Kafka
    Weโ€™re going to setup a Kafka cluster using confluent.io, create a producer and consumer as well as enhance our behavior driven tests to include the new interface. Weโ€™re going to update our helm chart so that the updates are seamless to Kubernetes and weโ€™re going to leverage our observability stack to propagate the traces in the published messages. Source: over 3 years ago

Spring Cloud Data Flow mentions (1)

  • Dataflow, a self-hosted Observable Notebook Editor
    And a Cloudera project: https://www.cloudera.com/products/cdf.html And an Azure feature: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/control-flow-execute-data-flow-activity And a Spring feature: https://spring.io/projects/spring-cloud-dataflow. - Source: Hacker News / over 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Confluent and Spring Cloud Data Flow, you can also consider the following products

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

Google Cloud Dataflow - Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully-managed cloud service and programming model for batch and streaming big data processing.

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

Spark Streaming - Spark Streaming makes it easy to build scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications.

Radicalbit - Event Stream Processing

Azure Stream Analytics - Azure Stream Analytics offers real-time stream processing in the cloud.