Apache Beam vs Arroyo
Apache Beam
beam.apache.org
Arroyo
arroyo.devSide by side
| Figure | Apache Beam | Arroyo |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $5/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 3 |
| Spec score · Stream Processing Software | 9.0 (#2) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Company legal name | Crunchbase identifies the legal entity behind the project as The Apache Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization. | Crunchbase identifies the company legal name as Arroyo Systems, Inc. |
| Connectors | Beam I/O connectors provide read and write transforms for external storage systems, with connectors available for both batch and streaming pipelines. | Documented connectors include Kafka, Confluent Cloud, Kinesis, MySQL, Postgres, MQTT, NATS, Redis, Redpanda, Fluvio, Filesystem, Iceberg, WebSocket, SSE, Webhook and HTTP polling. |
| Founded | 2016 | 2022 |
| Support | Beam users can get community support through the user mailing list, Stack Overflow, and the Beam Slack channel. | The deployment guide invites users rolling out clusters to contact [email protected] or ask questions on Discord. |
| What it does | Apache Beam is an open-source programming model for building batch and streaming data-processing pipelines. | Arroyo is a Rust distributed stream-processing engine for running SQL over bounded and unbounded event streams with sub-second results. |
Plans
Arroyo
- Arroyo open-sourceFree
- Open-source Arroyo EngineFree
- Cloudflare Workers Paid with Pipelines$5 a month
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.
Arroyo
Arroyo is an open-source distributed engine for processing stateful computations on data streams, with sub-second results. Users build streaming pipelines in analytical SQL, including complex queries, windows and joins. Arroyo supports checkpointing for fault tolerance and recovery, exactly-once processing, and horizontal and vertical rescaling; it says the engine can handle millions of events per second. Its connectors include Kafka, Kinesis, MQTT, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Delta Lake, HTTP and WebSocket, among others. It reads and writes JSON, Avro, Parquet, text and binary, and includes more than 300 SQL functions. Rust scalar, aggregate and asynchronous user-defined functions can extend SQL. The web UI supports connection management, query development and testing, and pipeline monitoring; pipeline management is also available through a REST API. Single-node clusters are intended for development and testing, while production deployments use a distributed cluster with Arroyo’s scheduler or Kubernetes. It is Apache 2.0 licensed, free at free, and self-hostable.