Apache Kafka vs. TIBCO® BPM Enterprise

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.

The scenario where TIBCO ActiveMatrix is well suited is in the scenario where there are more long-term business processes and in a complex corporate organization where there are many users with different privileges to perform actions on the same processes. It's less appropriate where there are no complex business process especially if the resubmit of the task in error is not required.

Incentivized

• 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).

Incentivized

• TIBCO offers multiple ways to implement the sophisticated forms of event-driven BPM. It also balances the combination of business rules and AMX BPM for a different variety of IT Applications
• It depends on the Enterprise service bus which is message oriented middleware
• The integration of Spotfire with AMXBPM and BusinessEvents is a unique advantage

Incentivized

• 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

• A little bit too conservative. Not really anything leading edge. [Tibco] has plenty of customers, and that means they will probably be around forever, but [product enhancements] seem to be more [abundant in competitor product offerings].
• It would be great to have some pre-defined themes. Pie chart labels - it would be great to get more options for sizing and placement.
• I find it hard to trust the online portal too much. I doubt the security that is offered by this software.

Incentivized

Kafka is quickly becoming core product of the organization, indeed it is replacing older messaging systems. No better alternatives found yet

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Such a BPM sw is amazing and usefull. You have a gret visibility in design and development phase.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Because our support team is always available also for development suggestions.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

For BPM we looked at some IBM products suites, BPM Online, Oracle products and Pega Systems. The decision to go with AMX BPM was based on the evaluation by the software architect team and the cost of acquiring the TIBCO suites.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• In order to create a BPM management, you need to make a very solid data management model, which becomes very important in its reuse
• The business process is very often unconnected with the implementation logic and therefore plays in favor of the re-usability of the software
• Large customization at log level for which managing these tools can be handled minimizing effort

Incentivized