Apache Beam vs Apache Samza
Apache Beam
beam.apache.org
Apache Samza
samza.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Apache Beam | Apache Samza |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · Big Data Analytics Software | 9.1 (#1) | 7.8 (#18) |
| Spec score · Streaming Analytics Software | 9.0 (#1) | 7.8 (#11) |
| Spec score · Stream Processing Software | 9.0 (#2) | 7.8 (#13) |
| Founded | 2016 | 2013 |
| Security | Apache release files include OpenPGP signatures and SHA-512 checksums so users can verify downloaded files. | The background documentation says Samza works with YARN, which supports Hadoop’s security model, and uses Linux cgroups for resource isolation. |
| Support | Beam users can get community support through the user mailing list, Stack Overflow, and the Beam Slack channel. | The project directs users to a user mailing list subscribed to by Samza users, contributors, and committers. |
Plans
In their own words
Apache Beam
Apache Beam is an open-source programming model for building data-processing pipelines across batch and streaming workloads. The same model can support both patterns in production, while runners provide different execution back ends, including Dataflow, Flink, Spark, and the Direct Runner. SDKs and quickstarts cover Java, Python, Go, and TypeScript. Pipeline building blocks include ParDo, GroupByKey, Flatten, and Combine, alongside windowing and triggering. Beam I/O connectors supply read and write transforms for external storage in batch or streaming pipelines, with catalog examples such as BigQuery, Snowflake, Apache Parquet, and Apache Iceberg. Beam Playground provides a way to try examples and transforms without a local installation. The software is free and open source; the listed plan is free, but execution costs depend on the runner and infrastructure selected. It targets data and software developers building pipelines on supported back ends. APIs may change before the first stable 1.x release, and semantic-versioning practice has exceptions.
Apache Samza
Apache Samza is a free, open-source distributed framework for applications that process data from multiple sources in real time. It supports stateless and stateful workloads, using a scalable, fault-tolerant state store for retained application state. Developers can use the high-level Streams API, lower-level Task API, Samza SQL or an Apache Beam API; Beam support for Python and Go is described as work in progress. Java and Scala applications can embed Samza as a lightweight client library. Built-in integrations include Apache Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Azure Event Hubs, Elasticsearch and Apache Hadoop, with custom sources also supported. Samza runs on YARN, Kubernetes or as a standalone library across public-cloud, containerized and bare-metal environments. Host affinity and incremental checkpointing help recover tasks and their state after failures. Processing is at least once. The project supports SQL processing and event-time windows, and its documentation describes applications with several terabytes of state and thousands of cores. Samza is self-hosted on Linux and distributed as source artifacts and through Maven; there is no binary release at this time.