Azure Stream Analytics vs. Google Cloud Dataflow vs. IBM Streams (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Stream Analytics
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft offers Azure Stream Analytics for IoT and connected devices, supporting real-time analytics and reporting.
$0.11
per hour with a 1 SU minimum
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
Azure Stream AnalyticsGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Standard
$0.11
per hour with a 1 SU minimum
Dedicated
$0.11
per hour with a 36 SU minimum
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Stream AnalyticsGoogle 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 DetailsAzure Stream Analytics is priced by the number of Streaming Units provisioned. A Streaming Unit represents the amount of memory and compute allocated to your resources.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure Stream AnalyticsGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Features
Azure Stream AnalyticsGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Streaming Analytics
Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Azure Stream Analytics
6.1
1 Ratings
27% below 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 Analysis7.01 Ratings8.02 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources7.01 Ratings9.02 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Low Latency8.01 Ratings9.02 Ratings7.93 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools2.01 Ratings6.01 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Data wrangling and preparation7.01 Ratings7.01 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out5.01 Ratings8.02 Ratings7.72 Ratings
Data Enrichment7.01 Ratings8.02 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Visualization Dashboards00 Ratings5.01 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Machine Learning Automation00 Ratings6.02 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure Stream AnalyticsGoogle 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 9.8 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
Azure Stream AnalyticsGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure Stream AnalyticsGoogle Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Data enrichment is effectively done in stream analytics also checking the values with different functionality like windowing and group by clause is effectively working.
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • Routing of data from multiple inputs to multiple output
  • You create your own user define function.
  • Intermediate query is working very effectively.
Read full review
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
Microsoft
  • Code competency is not that much effective
  • Ml models can't be integrated with stream analytics
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
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Azure Stream Analytics is easy to implement and also to integrate compare to other services like iot analytics
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Very nice roi while using it.
  • Multiple integration is the best functionality
Read full review
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
Read full review
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