Google Cloud Dataflow vs. IBM Streams (discontinued) vs. Spotfire Streaming

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Spotfire Streaming
Score 5.1 out of 10
N/A
The Spotfire Streaming (formerly TIBCO Streaming or StreamBase) platform is a high-performance system for rapidly building applications that analyze and act on real-time streaming data. Using Spotfire Streaming, users can rapidly build real-time systems and deploy them at a fraction of the cost and risk of other alternatives.N/A
Pricing
Google Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)Spotfire Streaming
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)Spotfire Streaming
Free Trial
NoNoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)Spotfire Streaming
Features
Google Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)Spotfire Streaming
Streaming Analytics
Comparison of Streaming Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Google Cloud Dataflow
7.3
2 Ratings
9% below category average
IBM Streams (discontinued)
8.3
5 Ratings
4% above category average
Spotfire Streaming
8.3
2 Ratings
4% above category average
Real-Time Data Analysis8.02 Ratings8.05 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Visualization Dashboards5.01 Ratings10.05 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Data Ingestion from Multiple Data Sources9.02 Ratings9.05 Ratings9.02 Ratings
Low Latency9.02 Ratings7.93 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Integrated Development Tools6.01 Ratings8.04 Ratings7.31 Ratings
Data wrangling and preparation7.01 Ratings8.04 Ratings5.02 Ratings
Linear Scale-Out8.02 Ratings7.72 Ratings00 Ratings
Machine Learning Automation6.02 Ratings9.05 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Data Enrichment8.02 Ratings7.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Google Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)Spotfire Streaming
Small Businesses
IBM Streams (discontinued)
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis
Score 9.9 out of 10
IBM Streams (discontinued)
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 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
IBM Streams (discontinued)
IBM Streams (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)Spotfire Streaming
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
5.2
(15 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google Cloud DataflowIBM Streams (discontinued)Spotfire Streaming
Likelihood to Recommend
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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Spotfire
Taking data from various sources including files, databases, web services, applying some complex rules, transforming, aggregating and producing a result. This is what Spotfire Streaming does best.
- If one needs connectivity to special services as secured databases or web services, building interactive web apps, those are probably tasks that shall be addressed with different tools.
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Pros
Google
  • Streaming, Real time work load
  • Batch processing
  • Auto scaling
  • flexible pricing
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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.
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Spotfire
  • Processing events in real-time with real low latency and high throughput.
  • 100% visual program language, which can be extended by common languages like Java, Python and .NET.
  • Reduced time to prototype, create an application and deployment, which reduces the software lifecycle.
  • Real robust engine and server. Barely heard of customers having issues in production.
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Cons
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.
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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.
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Spotfire
  • Being a niche tool, there's not much community support
  • It is on prem, making it slow to boot. not cloud native (It could be that it is our org's issue)
  • The dev environment is very tough to understand for large projects due to the wire style UI/UX
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Usability
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
Spotfire
The usability is good in terms that it gets well integrated with the Spotfire suite but the only few issues I have is the tough UI/UX (learning curve, if the project is huge) and unable to find many users and devs to help with the queries. At the end it is solely based on the documentation provided which is never enough
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Support Rating
Google
No answers on this topic
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Spotfire
Spotfire Streaming support is prompt and to the point. They help with best practices and learning from existing projects.
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Alternatives Considered
Google
Google Cloud Dataproc Cloud Datafusion
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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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Spotfire
We are using Dataflow (by Google).The development time in Spotfire Streaming is definitely shorter because its GUI based. Dataflow handles late arrivals after the window closes, not sure Spotfire Streaming can do that. Dataflow can run GCP as a managed service which is why we chose that tool for our new product.
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Return on Investment
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
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Spotfire
  • While we haven't specifically integrated Spotfire Streaming into our product development, it has allowed us to see the benefits of real-time streaming data.
  • We have much more visibility into how our longer term roadmap will look and what we should focus on.
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ScreenShots

Spotfire Streaming Screenshots

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