The 11 Best Data Streaming Platforms and Tools to Consider for 2024

Solutions Review’s listing of the best data streaming platforms and tools (commercial) is an annual mashup of products that best represent current market conditions, according to the crowd. Our editors selected the best data streaming platforms and tools based on each solution’s Authority Score; a meta-analysis of real user sentiment through the web’s most trusted business software review sites and our own proprietary five-point inclusion criteria.

The editors at Solutions Review have developed this resource to assist buyers in search of the best data streaming platforms and tools to fit the needs of their organization. Choosing the right vendor and solution can be a complicated process — one that requires in-depth research and often comes down to more than just the solution and its technical capabilities. To make your search a little easier, we’ve profiled the best data streaming platforms and tools providers all in one place. We’ve also included platform and product line names and introductory software tutorials straight from the source so you can see each solution in action.

Note: The best data streaming platforms and tools (commercial) are listed in alphabetical order.

The Best Data Streaming Platforms and Tools (Commercial)

Confluent

Platform: Confluent Platform

Related products: Confluent Cloud

Description: The Confluent Platform is a complete, enterprise-grade distribution of Apache Kafka. It lets users connect, process, and react to data in real-time. Confluent is self-managed for continuously streaming data and democratizes access to Kafka for quicker application development. It includes enterprise-grade security functionality as well, and customers can deploy it on their preferred infrastructure. Confluent Cloud is a fully-managed, cloud-native service for connecting and processing data.

elastic.io

Platform: elastic.io iPaaS

Description: elastic.io offers a low-code Integration Platform as a Service solution that connects your enterprise applications cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground. The product also facilitates the flow of data via API-led integration and can integrate with B2B partners. Users can access custom-built applications via APIs and connect to legacy and BI systems. elastic.io touts a flexible architecture that is robust enough to handle out-of-the-ordinary surges in data flow and is cloud-native by nature.

Equalum

Platform: Equalum

Description: Equalum offers an enterprise-grade real-time data streaming platform trusted by Fortune 500 companies to stream data continuously across cloud, on-prem and hybrid environments, powering data warehouse modernization, real-time analytics, AI/BI, and more. Backed by change data capture (CDC) and utilizing binary log parsing for 10x increased throughput and 90 percent reduced source footprint, Equalum’s platform features drag-and-drop UI, data replication, and ETL tools (including Spark and Kafka) that allow you to build real-time data pipelines quickly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NosXCxOMFHY

GigaSpaces

Platform: Smart DIH

Description: GigaSpaces Smart DIH helps organizations solve for digital transformation by decoupling enterprise systems of record (SoRs) from digital applications. With GigaSpaces, enterprises can quickly launch cloud-native digital services even if they rely on legacy systems. Smart DIH is a digital integration hub solution based on GigaSpaces’ popular distributed in-memory data platform. It includes all the components an organization needs to decouple digital applications from their SoR.

Hitachi Vantara

Platform: Pentaho Platform

Related products: Lumada Data Services

Description: Hitachi Vantara’s Pentaho platform for data integration and analytics offers traditional capabilities and big data connectivity. The solution supports the latest Hadoop distributions from Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, and Amazon Web Services. However, one of the tool’s shortcomings is that its big data focus takes attention away from other use cases. Pentaho can be deployed on-prem, in the cloud, or via a hybrid model. The tool’s most recent update to version 8 features Spark and Kafka stream processing improvements and security add-ons.

IBM

Platform: IBM Streams

Related products: IBM InfoSphere Information Server, IBM InfoSphere Classic Federation Server, IBM InfoSphere Data Replication, IBM InfoSphere DataStage, IBM App Connect, IBM Streams, IBM Data Refinery, IBM BigIntegrate, IBM Cloud Integration

Description: IBM offers several distinct data integration tools in both on-prem and cloud deployments, and for virtually every enterprise use case. Its on-prem data integration suite features tools for traditional (replication and batch processing) and modern integration synchronization and data virtualization) requirements. IBM also offers a variety of prebuilt functions and connectors. The mega-vendor’s cloud integration product is widely considered one of the best in the marketplace, and additional functionality is coming in the months ahead.

Informatica

Platform: Informatica Data Engineering Streams

Related products: Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica PowerExchange, Informatica Data Replication, Informatica B2B Data Transformation, Informatica B2B Data Exchange, Informatica Big Data Integration Hub, Informatica Data Services, Informatica Big Data Management, Informatica Big Data Integration Hub, Informatica Big Data Streaming, Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, Informatica Enterprise Data Preparation, Informatica Edge Data Streaming, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services

Description: Informatica’s data integration tools portfolio includes both on-prem and cloud deployments for a number of enterprise use cases. The vendor combines advanced hybrid integration and governance functionality with self-service business access for various analytic functions. Augmented integration is possible via Informatica’s CLAIRE Engine, a metadata-driven AI engine that applies machine learning. Informatica touts strong interoperability between its growing list of data management software products.

StreamSets

Platform: StreamSets Data Collector

Related products: StreamSets DataOps Platform

Description: StreamSets offers a DataOps platform that features smart data pipelines with built-in data drift detection and handling, as well as a hybrid architecture. The product also includes automation and collaboration capabilities across the design-deploy-operate lifecycle. StreamSets monitors data in-flight to detect changes and predicts downstream issues to ensure continuous delivery without errors or data loss. The tool’s live data map, data performance SLAs and data protection functionality are major value-adds.

Striim

Platform: Striim Platform

Related products: Striim for Azure, Striim for Amazon Web Services, Striim for Google Cloud Platform, Striim for Snowflake

Description: Striim offers a real-time data integration solution that enables continuous query processing and streaming analytics. Striim integrates data from a wide variety of sources, including transaction/change data, events, log files, application and IoT sensor, and real-time correlation across multiple streams. The platform features pre-built data pipelines, out-of-the-box wizards for configuration and coding, and a drag-and-drop dashboard builder.

Talend

Platform: Talend Data Streams

Related products: Talend Open Studio, Talend Data Fabric, Talend Data Management Platform, Talend Big Data Platform, Talend Data Services Platform, Talend Integration Cloud, Talend Stitch Data Loader

Description: Talend offers an expansive portfolio of data integration and data management tools. The company’s flagship tool, Open Studio for Data Integration, is available via a free open-source license. Talend Integration Cloud is offered in three separate editions (SaaS, hybrid, elastic), and provides broad connectivity, built-in data quality, and native code generation to support big data technologies. Big data components and connectors include Hadoop, NoSQL, MapReduce, Spark, machine learning, and IoT.

Upsolver

Platform: Upsolver

Description: Upsolver offers a no-code data lake engineering platform designed for agile cloud analytics. The product features a self-service compute layer between data lakes and analytics tools to automate menial data pipeline work. Upsolver touts capabilities for running data ingestion, performance optimization, real-time processing, and upserts into cloud storage. Built-in connectors enable ingestion from message brokers, object storage, or databases. Key features include a visual SQL IDE, schema on read detection, and fully-managed processing jobs execution.