Apache Kafka is an open-source stream processing platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java. The Kafka event streaming platform is used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.
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Springbot
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Springbot aims to bring all the marketing capabilities large retailers have to small businesses at a fraction of the cost. Through Springbot, online stores will be able to leverage automated marketing on channels such as email, SMS, social and online ads. Business owners and marketers who find themselves wearing many hats can still send the right message at the right time with confidence. With an all-in-one marketing automation platform designed with ease of use in mind, business…
$199
for up to 5,000 subscribers (includes email marketing, social hub, reporting and dashboards, signup forms, automations, account management, support and onboarding. See website for additional package options.
Pricing
Apache Kafka
Springbot
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Platform Base Package
$199/month
for up to 5,000 subscribers (includes email marketing, social hub, reporting and dashboards, signup forms, automations, account management, support and onboarding. See website for additional package options.
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache Kafka
Springbot
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
See website for pricing calculator for additional pricing options.
Apache Kafka is well-suited for most data-streaming use cases. Amazon Kinesis and Azure EventHubs, unless you have a specific use case where using those cloud PaAS for your data lakes, once set up well, Apache Kafka will take care of everything else in the background. Azure EventHubs, is good for cross-cloud use cases, and Amazon Kinesis - I have no real-world experience. But I believe it is the same.
Really easy to configure. I've used other message brokers such as RabbitMQ and compared to them, Kafka's configurations are very easy to understand and tweak.
Very scalable: easily configured to run on multiple nodes allowing for ease of parallelism (assuming your queues/topics don't have to be consumed in the exact same order the messages were delivered)
Not exactly a feature, but I trust Kafka will be around for at least another decade because active development has continued to be strong and there's a lot of financial backing from Confluent and LinkedIn, and probably many other companies who are using it (which, anecdotally, is many).
The demographic data was great. I could see how many males vs. females, ages, income, married, with or without children. It gave me a good idea of who my customers were.
Using their tracking URLs in all of our campaigns allowed us to get a better idea of what exactly was driving revenue.
Not only could I see top performing products, which I can do within Magento, I could also see top selling categories and colors.
I can pull a Coupon Usage report our of Magento, but Springbot gave me additional info like AOV and ROI on those codes.
Springbot also gave me a lot of info about our abandoned carts. It shows us which products are most abandoned along with views, conversion rates, etc.
Springbot gave us an Instagram Shop page that allowed us to curate social shares and then tie them to products on our site.
Sometimes it becomes difficult to monitor our Kafka deployments. We've been able to overcome it largely using AWS MSK, a managed service for Apache Kafka, but a separate monitoring dashboard would have been great.
Simplify the process for local deployment of Kafka and provide a user interface to get visibility into the different topics and the messages being processed.
Learning curve around creation of broker and topics could be simplified
After our purchase, I let spring or know that I was currently too busy to implement the system and to put things on hold. They ignored this request and kept charging us a monthly fee without using any of their systems. I have only logged in once. Nothing has been set up. They can see that from their side.
After multiple emails back and forth their out was in the user agreement. I never asked for my money back only credit so I can regroup and when I have time get on to implant the systems. They tell me they don't do that.
They don't care about any of the customer's needs. They only care about charging you that monthly fee. Terrible bus plan. With enough bad feedback, they will suffer from such a narrow plan.
I wish we had actual information about the cons using the system. Unfortunately I was not given the opportunity to do unless I wanted to keep paying while not using the system.
Apache Kafka is highly recommended to develop loosely coupled, real-time processing applications. Also, Apache Kafka provides property based configuration. Producer, Consumer and broker contain their own separate property file
Support for Apache Kafka (if willing to pay) is available from Confluent that includes the same time that created Kafka at Linkedin so they know this software in and out. Moreover, Apache Kafka is well known and best practices documents and deployment scenarios are easily available for download. For example, from eBay, Linkedin, Uber, and NYTimes.
We have raved about Springbot's support because they always get back with us so quickly. Our rep, Jared has been phenomenal in helping us, always being available to chat with us and explaining some of the metrics with us so we can better understand. He completely handles our ads, checks on them, and lets us know when to update and why.
I used other messaging/queue solutions that are a lot more basic than Confluent Kafka, as well as another solution that is no longer in the market called Xively, which was bought and "buried" by Google. In comparison, these solutions offer way fewer functionalities and respond to other needs.
Positive: Get a quick and reliable pub/sub model implemented - data across components flows easily.
Positive: it's scalable so we can develop small and scale for real-world scenarios
Negative: it's easy to get into a confusing situation if you are not experienced yet or something strange has happened (rare, but it does). Troubleshooting such situations can take time and effort.
Springbot gave us a better idea of who our customer was. We just launched in January 2015 having been B2B previously. So we weren't really sure who we were marketing to.
I only paid $200/month for the service so I didn't waste a ton of money trying it out. They have a 30 day cancellation policy so I wasn't stuck in a year long contract.
It was a let down because I had such high hopes of everything it would allow me to do and see with one platform. Give them a couple more years and I think they will work out the kinks.
