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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Workato
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Workato is a cloud or on-premise automation and integration platform with enterprise-grade
capabilities and no coding required. Workato provides pre-built connectors to integrate with over 300
business applications and enables task automation across apps.
Workato is useful for the rapid development of simple workflow-oriented integrations. It was not designed for large, enterprise integrations like Boomi. Their target audiences and target use cases overlap in some areas, but there are very important differences. We selected …
Features
Apache Kafka
Workato
Cloud Data Integration
Comparison of Cloud Data Integration features of Product A and Product B
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.
Workato is brilliant to make separate applications work together without much effort or specialists being needed. When specific events on software A should trigger actions on B (or more) and you want that to happen without any development or big budgets, that's where Workato comes into play. It's a great help if you want tasks automated, communications flowing and data synced between different applications.
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 Workato product interface is brilliantly thought through and designed. The learning curve for first timers is easy enough to get started and build useful things, and Workato really shines in their ability to handle complex triggers and interactions. Workato allows people to build software apps so much faster than by coding each functionality.
Workato has fantastic documentation, making things accessible without any holes in the product. The product just works, never has any bugs, never lags, and just generally allows us to see and change exactly what we need to.
Workato has an absolutely amazing support team. We tried the free version for a while, then realized it was the single most important software tool we have, and we upgraded. The support at the paid tier is A+, seriously the best from any company we've worked with. Feels more like a good friend then a support rep.
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
Customer support - responsive, but often not equipped to help efficiently identify root cause of issue. Need to improve escalation to technical resources and turnaround time
Recipe organization and sharing. Can be challenging to copy recipes, or grab recipes from publicly available site. There are often dependencies and errors that have vague descriptions.
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
The sheer work Workato eliminates from people's daily jobs is simply a great contribution to people's productivity and a boost to capability. It actually strikes the balance between business and tech teams. It also reduces dependency on developers, and speeds up their delivery too. The only reason it's not a full 10/10 is for the price - it's a bit expensive for what we'd like, and their batch or high data volume processing can be improved.
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.
They employ an extremely knowledgeable team of problem solvers. I've never had a disappointing interaction or one that has left me still searching for answers. I know that when I ask for help, they'll partner with me until we find a solution together
We discovered that we could not use Workato for our more complex, large enterprise integrations. It was useful for simple workflows that matched the prebuilt recipes.
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.
We already used Zapier, but since it doesn't support NetSuite we had to choose another automation platform. Now that we've been using Workato for a few months, we have plans to move the stuff we're going through Zapier to Workato. We set up a trial account with all the other platforms, and they were all more expensive and A LOT more complicated than Workato.
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.
As business consultants, Workato has greatly improved our offerings to our clients as well as improved the time frame to implement automated workflows and integrations.
For our clients, the return on investment is almost immediate. Once a Workato recipe is up and running (which can be done very fast), data is integrating, duplicate data entry and user errors are eliminated, and cross-company KPI metrics are easier to report than ever.
