Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

InfluxData VS Apache Druid

Compare InfluxData VS Apache Druid and see what are their differences

InfluxData logo InfluxData

Scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics.

Apache Druid logo Apache Druid

Fast column-oriented distributed data store
  • InfluxData Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-30
  • Apache Druid Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-07

InfluxData features and specs

  • High Performance
    InfluxData's InfluxDB is designed to handle high write and query loads, making it suitable for time-series data and real-time applications.
  • Open-Source
    The core InfluxDB product is open-source, allowing for transparency, community contributions, and the option to self-host the database.
  • Scalability
    InfluxDB offers horizontal scalability, enabling users to handle increasing volumes of data efficiently through clustering.
  • Built-In Data Processing
    InfluxData offers integrated tools for data processing and scripting, such as Kapacitor for real-time processing and Flux for advanced querying.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    InfluxData provides a comprehensive ecosystem including Telegraf for data collection, Chronograf for visualization, and Kapacitor for alerting and processing.
  • Time-Series Focused
    InfluxDB is optimized for time-series data, offering specialized features like time-based retention policies, continuous queries, and downsampling.
  • Easy Integration
    InfluxDB integrates well with many third-party data visualization and monitoring tools such as Grafana, making it easier to build end-to-end solutions.

Possible disadvantages of InfluxData

  • Complexity
    The comprehensive features and tools in the InfluxData ecosystem can result in a steeper learning curve, especially for novices.
  • Cost
    While the open-source version is free, the enterprise and cloud-hosted versions come with a cost, which can be significant for small to mid-sized businesses.
  • Resource Intensive
    InfluxDB can be resource-intensive, especially under high loads, requiring significant hardware resources for optimal performance.
  • Limited SQL Support
    InfluxDB doesn’t fully support SQL, which can be a hurdle for users accustomed to traditional relational databases. It uses its own query languages like InfluxQL and Flux.
  • Fragmented Documentation
    Some users find the documentation fragmented or lacking in depth, which can make troubleshooting and advanced usage more challenging.
  • Data Backup and Restore
    Managing backups and restores in InfluxDB can be intricate and may require additional effort and tools to ensure data integrity and availability.

Apache Druid features and specs

  • Real-Time Data Ingestion
    Apache Druid supports real-time data ingestion, which allows users to immediately query and analyze freshly ingested data, making it ideal for applications that require up-to-the-minute insights.
  • High Performance
    Druid is designed to provide fast query performance, especially for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) queries. Its architecture leverages techniques like indexing, compression, and shard-based parallel processing to deliver quick results, even on large data sets.
  • Scalability
    Druid's architecture allows it to scale horizontally, supporting both large amounts of data and numerous concurrent queries. This makes it suitable for systems that need to handle high scalability requirements.
  • Flexible Data Exploration
    It supports complex queries, including group-bys, filters, and aggregations, which are essential for exploratory data analysis. Users can perform a wide range of data slicing and dicing operations.
  • Rich Multi-Tenancy Support
    Druid supports multi-tenancy, enabling different user groups to access and query the database simultaneously without performance degradation, thus accommodating diverse data analytics requirements within the same system.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Druid

  • Complex Setup and Configuration
    Setting up and configuring Apache Druid can be complex and resource-intensive. It requires a good understanding of its architecture and components, which may pose a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Resource Heavy
    Druid can be resource-intensive, often requiring significant CPU, memory, and disk resources, especially when handling large scale data and high query loads. This can result in increased infrastructure costs.
  • Limited Transactional Support
    Druid is not designed for transactional workloads and lacks full ACID compliance. It is optimized for read-heavy analytical queries rather than write-heavy transactional operations.
  • Complexity in Handling Updates
    Updating or deleting existing records in Druid is not straightforward and often involves re-indexing data. This can complicate use cases where mutable data is a common requirement.
  • Limited Tooling and Ecosystem
    Compared to more established databases and analytical engines, Druid's ecosystem and available tooling for development, monitoring, and management might be less extensive, potentially requiring custom solutions.

InfluxData videos

Barbara Nelson [InfluxData] | Best Practices for Data Ingestion into InfluxDB

Apache Druid videos

An introduction to Apache Druid

More videos:

  • Review - Building a Real-Time Analytics Stack with Apache Kafka and Apache Druid

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to InfluxData and Apache Druid)
Databases
66 66%
34% 34
Time Series Database
100 100%
0% 0
Big Data
44 44%
56% 56
NoSQL Databases
77 77%
23% 23

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare InfluxData and Apache Druid

InfluxData Reviews

ReductStore vs. MinIO & InfluxDB on LTE Network: Who Really Wins the Speed Race?
Maintaining consistency between multiple databases, like MinIO and InfluxDB, adds a layer of complexity. In our setup, MinIO, used for blob storage, is linked to data points in InfluxDB via its filename. Any inconsistencies or mismatches between the two could potentially result in data loss. Furthermore, we need to query both databases, which is quite inefficient. Lastly,...
Apache Druid vs. Time-Series Databases
We occasionally get questions regarding how Apache Druid differs from time-series databases (TSDB) such as InfluxDB or Prometheus, and when to use each technology. This short post serves to help answer these questions.
Source: imply.io
4 Best Time Series Databases To Watch in 2019
InfluxDB is part of the TICK stack : Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf and Kapacitor. InfluxData provides, out of the box, a visualization tool (that can be compared to Grafana), a data processing engine that binds directly with InfluxDB, and a set of more than 50+ agents that can collect real-time metrics for a lot of different data sources.
Source: medium.com

Apache Druid Reviews

Rockset, ClickHouse, Apache Druid, or Apache Pinot? Which is the best database for customer-facing analytics?
“When you're dealing with highly concurrent environments, you really need an architecture that’s designed for that CPU efficiency to get the most performance out of the smallest hardware footprint—which is another reason why folks like to use Apache Druid,” says David Wang, VP of Product and Corporate Marketing at Imply. (Imply offers Druid as a service.)
Source: embeddable.com
Apache Druid vs. Time-Series Databases
Druid is a real-time analytics database that not only incorporates architecture designs from TSDBs such as time-based partitioning and fast aggregation, but also includes ideas from search systems and data warehouses, making it a great fit for all types of event-driven data. Druid is fundamentally an OLAP engine at heart, albeit one designed for more modern, event-driven...
Source: imply.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Druid should be more popular than InfluxData. It has been mentiond 10 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.

InfluxData mentions (2)

  • Can i log data into excel/csv using aws?
    I would highly recommend using a proper Time Series Database like QuestDB or InfluxDB to do this instead. You can always export data from wither of those two into Excel if your boss wants it in excel, but it's much easier to do data transformations, create graphs and reports, etc. If you have all the data in a proper database. Source: over 3 years ago
  • How to stream IoT data into Excel
    I would suggest using something better suited to IoT data than ... a spreadsheet. I'd recommend looking at one of the Time Series Databases for this. 1) QuestDB or 2) InfluxDB as these are much better suited to streaming data. Source: over 3 years ago

Apache Druid mentions (10)

  • Why You Shouldn’t Invest In Vector Databases?
    Regarding the storage aspect of vector databases, it is noteworthy that indexing techniques take precedence over the choice of underlying storage. In fact, many databases have the capability to incorporate indexing modules directly, enabling efficient vector search. Existing OLAP databases that are designed for real-time analytics and utilizing columnar storage, such as ClickHouse, Apache Pinot, and Apache Druid,... - Source: dev.to / 19 days ago
  • How to choose the right type of database
    Apache Druid: Focused on real-time analytics and interactive queries on large datasets. Druid is well-suited for high-performance applications in user-facing analytics, network monitoring, and business intelligence. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Choosing Between a Streaming Database and a Stream Processing Framework in Python
    Online analytical processing (OLAP) databases like Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, and ClickHouse shine in addressing user-initiated analytical queries. You might write a query to analyze historical data to find the most-clicked products over the past month efficiently using OLAP databases. When contrasting with streaming databases, they may not be optimized for incremental computation, leading to challenges in... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Analysing Github Stars - Extracting and analyzing data from Github using Apache NiFi®, Apache Kafka® and Apache Druid®
    Spencer Kimball (now CEO at CockroachDB) wrote an interesting article on this topic in 2021 where they created spencerkimball/stargazers based on a Python script. So I started thinking: could I create a data pipeline using Nifi and Kafka (two OSS tools often used with Druid) to get the API data into Druid - and then use SQL to do the analytics? The answer was yes! And I have documented the outcome below. Here’s... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Apache Druid® - an enterprise architect's overview
    Apache Druid is part of the modern data architecture. It uses a special data format designed for analytical workloads, using extreme parallelisation to get data in and get data out. A shared-nothing, microservices architecture helps you to build highly-available, extreme scale analytics features into your applications. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing InfluxData and Apache Druid, you can also consider the following products

TimescaleDB - TimescaleDB is a time-series SQL database providing fast analytics, scalability, with automated data management on a proven storage engine.

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

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

ClickHouse - ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented database management system that allows generating analytical data reports in real time.

Amazon EMR - Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that makes it easy to quickly process vast amounts of data.

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