Amazon Kinesis vs. Google Cloud Dataflow vs. IBM Streams (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Kinesis
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Kinesis is a streaming analytics suite for data intake from video or other disparate sources and applying analytics for machine learning (ML) and business intelligence.
$0.01
per GB data ingested / consumed
Google Cloud Dataflow
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Google offers Cloud Dataflow, a managed streaming analytics platform for real-time data insights, fraud detection, and other purposes.N/A
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
A real-time analytics solution that turns fast-moving volumes and varieties into insights. Streams evaluates a broad range of streaming data — unstructured text, video, audio, geospatial and sensor. The product was sunsetted in 2024.N/A
Pricing
Amazon KinesisGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Amazon Kinesis Video Streams
$0.00850
per GB data ingested / consumed
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
$0.04
per hour per stream
Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics
$0.11
per hour
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
tiered pricing starting at $0.029
per month first 500 TB ingested
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon KinesisGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Free Trial
NoNoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon KinesisGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Features
Amazon KinesisGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Streaming Analytics
Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Kinesis
8.3
2 Ratings
4% above category average
Google Cloud Dataflow
7.3
2 Ratings
9% below category average
IBM Streams (discontinued)
8.3
5 Ratings
4% above category average
Real-Time Data Analysis10.01 Ratings8.02 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources9.02 Ratings9.02 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Low Latency9.02 Ratings9.02 Ratings7.93 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools9.02 Ratings6.01 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Data wrangling and preparation10.01 Ratings7.01 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out6.12 Ratings8.02 Ratings7.72 Ratings
Data Enrichment5.01 Ratings8.02 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Visualization Dashboards00 Ratings5.01 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Machine Learning Automation00 Ratings6.02 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon KinesisGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Small Businesses
IBM Streams (discontinued)
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Streams (discontinued)
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Confluent
Confluent
Score 9.2 out of 10
Confluent
Confluent
Score 9.2 out of 10
Confluent
Confluent
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 5.1 out of 10
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 5.1 out of 10
Spotfire Streaming
Spotfire Streaming
Score 5.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon KinesisGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(3 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Support Rating
7.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon KinesisGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Amazon Kinesis is a great replacement for Kafka and it works better whenever the components of the solution are AWS based. Best if extended fan-out is not required, but still price-performance ratio is very good for simplifying maintenance.
I would go with a different option if the systems to be connected are legacy, for instance in the case of traditional messaging clients.
Read full review
Google
It is best in cases where you have batch as well as streaming data. Also in some cases where you have batch data right now and in future you will get streaming data. In those cases Dataflow is very good. Also in cases where most of your infra is on GCP. It might not be good when you already are on AWS or Azure. And also you want in-depth control over security and management. Then you can directly use Apache beam over Dataflow.
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Discontinued Products
Like the name says, it is good for streaming data and analyzing. It is great to look at tuples at a fast rate, filtering, calling other sources to enrich data, can call APIs, etc. Could do better for ingest use cases, can do better with guaranteed delivery, etc.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Processing huge loads of data
  • Integrating well with IoT Platform on Amazon
  • Integration with overall AWS Ecosystem
  • Scalability
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Google
  • Streaming, Real time work load
  • Batch processing
  • Auto scaling
  • flexible pricing
Read full review
Discontinued Products
  • IBM Streams is well suited for providing wire-speed real-time end-to-end processing with sub-millisecond latency.
  • Streams is amazingly computationally efficient. In other words, you can typically do much more processing with a given amount of hardware than other technologies. In a recent linear-road benchmark Streams based application was able to provide greater capability than the Hadoop-based implementation using 10x less hardware. So even when latency isn't critical, using Streams might still make sense for reducing operational cost.
  • Streams comes out of the box with a large and comprehensive set of tested and optimized toolkits. Leveraging these toolkits not only reduces the development time and cost but also helps reduce project risk by eliminating the need for custom code which likely has not seen as much time in test or production.
  • In addition to the out of the box toolkits, there is an active developer community contributing additional specialized packages.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Not a queue system, so little visibility into "backlog" if there is any
  • Confusing terminology to make sure events aren't missed
  • Sometimes didn't seem to trigger Lambda functions, or dropped events when a lot came in
Read full review
Google
  • More templates for Bigquery and App Engine. There is only limited options for templates so the things we use can limit.
  • I would like native connectors for Excel (XLSX) to reduce the need for custom wrappers in financial pipelines.
  • Debugging Google Cloud Dataflow using only logs in Cloud Logging can be overwhelming sometimes, and it’s not always obvious which specific element in the flow caused a failure. IT uses a lot of time.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
  • Documentation could be more extensive, with more examples, although overall this is not too bad compared to some of the alternative solutions.
  • Seems expensive to use in production.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Google
It really saved a lot of time and it's flexibility really can give you infra which is future-proof for most of the use cases may it be streaming or batch data. And with this you can avoid use of resource-heavy big data offerings.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
The documentation was confusing and lacked examples. The streams suddenly stopped working with no explanation and there was no information in the logs. All these were more difficult when dealing with enhanced fan-out. In fact, we were about to abort the usage of Kinesis due to a misunderstanding with enhanced fan-out.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
The main benefit was around set up - incredibly easy to just start using Kinesis. Kinesis is a real-time data processing platform, while Kafka is more of a message queue system. If you only need a message queue from a limited source, Kafka may do the job. More complex use cases, with low latency, higher volume of data, real time decisions and integration with multiple sources and destination at a decent price, Kinesis is better.
Read full review
Google
Google Cloud Dataproc Cloud Datafusion
Read full review
Discontinued Products
There are well explained tutorials to get the user started. If you are looking for business application ideas, the user community offers a diversity of applications. It is very easy to launch applications on the cloud and can integrate with other analytic tools available on Watson Studio. It takes away the burden of the technology so that users can focus on business innovations.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Caused us to need to re-engineer some basic re-try logic
  • Caused us to drop some content without knowing it
  • Made monitoring much more difficult
  • We eventually switched back to SQS because Kinesis is not the same as a Queue system
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Google
  • cost saving from managing our own data center for ETL servers
  • consumption based pricing
  • with auto scaling feature, we were able to expand components to support work load
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Discontinued Products
  • Ability to do more with less
  • Admins and data analyst can now focus on more thinking tasks
  • No negative impacts yet
Read full review
ScreenShots