Apache Airflow vs. IBM StreamSets

For a quick job scanning of status and deep-diving into job issues, details, and flows, AirFlow does a good job. No fuss, no muss. The low learning curve as the UI is very straightforward, and navigating it will be familiar after spending some time using it. Our requirements are pretty simple. Job scheduler, workflows, and monitoring. The jobs we run are >100, but still is a lot to review and troubleshoot when jobs don't run. So when managing large jobs, AirFlow dated UI can be a bit of a drawback.

Incentivized

Because real-world sources often change (new fields get added, formats get tweaked, etc.), StreamSets helps detect and adapt to those "schema drifts" or changes automatically, or with minimal manual intervention. That makes pipelines more resilient and significantly reduces the maintenance burden. Therefore, data sets with constantly changing sources/formats are great for StreamSets.

Incentivized

• Apache Airflow is one of the best Orchestration platforms and a go-to scheduler for teams building a data platform or pipelines.
• Apache Airflow supports multiple operators, such as the Databricks, Spark, and Python operators. All of these provide us with functionality to implement any business logic.
• Apache Airflow is highly scalable, and we can run a large number of DAGs with ease. It provided HA and replication for workers. Maintaining airflow deployments is very easy, even for smaller teams, and we also get lots of metrics for observability.

Incentivized

• it connects to many data sources and helps catch issues early with built-in alerts and monitoring tools
• it supports real-time and batch processing, handles data drift well, and makes pipeline debugging easier with the updated UI

Incentivized

• A local "dry run" or IDE plugin that can validate and simulate DAG execution without needing a full environment.
• Better feedback on DAG parse errors in the UI or CLI.
• Navigating large DAGs with hundreds of tasks can be slow and hard to understand visually.

Incentivized

• Where the person's skillsets in data analysis is not of an expert.
• Data monitoring and analysis.
• Customer data for better customer acquisition

Incentivized

IBM Stream sets has been a wonderful addition to our technology stack. It has helped in some of our initiatives such as data engineering, data integration for not only external customers but also for internal purposes. The tool has also helped on our use cases related to streaming data. Moving to another tool would require significant amount of work and time.

Incentivized

For its capability to connect with multicloud environments. Access Control management is something that we don't get in all the schedulers and orchestrators. But although it provides so many flexibility and options to due to python , some level of knowledge of python is needed to be able to build workflows.

Incentivized

because i think that overall the solution is having a positive impact on the business, it allows multiple benefits in simplification of the tasks and is capable of doing multiple process that are usually done by a combination of man and systems, reducing the time and effort required to have the data.

Incentivized

Streamsets support has improved a lot in the last couple of years. We had some challenges in the beginning with support, but now the quality of the support and the responsiveness to tickets are better. We have contacted support multiple times when it came to scenarios where the system was slow or the output as not as we expected

Incentivized

I was not involved in the implementation

Incentivized

Apache Airflow is suited for a much wider set of use cases compared to Databricks. You can run it anywhere, and there is also no vendor lock-in. With Airflow, we can utilize almost any compute engine. Same thing we want to do with Databricks. There might be some level of difficulty based on the support.

Incentivized

Before, we were using Informatica since most of our applications were running on on-prem servers. Later, when we started moving to the cloud, we tried Informatica Cloud, but it's more useful for batch-oriented than streaming. That's why one of our tech architects suggested IBM StreamSets for our real-time data streaming. During the POC stage, we were happy that the data streaming was way better with IBM StreamSets compared to the Informatica Cloud way of doing.

Incentivized

• Most of the ETL processes were automated, cutting down on human labor.
• Apache Airflow's user interface (UI) was very informative and straightforward.
• Since ETL processes were providing data via airflow, we were able to gain a deeper comprehension of the data at hand.

Incentivized

• Reduced manual handling, cutting down operational costs for our team.
• It also accelerated our time to Insight, which has eventually led to faster decision making.
• Data quality is improved.

Incentivized