Apache Flink vs RisingWave

Apache Flink is a free, self-hosted framework and distributed processing engine for stateful computations over unbounded and bounded data streams. It supports event-driven applications, stream and batch analytics, and data pipelines and ETL. Listed correctness features include exactly-once state consistency, event-time processing and late-data handling. APIs include SQL for stream and batch data, DataStream and ProcessFunction for time and state. Operational capabilities cover flexible deployment, high availability, savepoints, scale-out architecture, very large state and incremental checkpoints. The project lists low latency, high throughput and in-memory computing. Flink runs in common cluster environments; for Kubernetes, the Kubernetes Operator is identified as the standard deployment mechanism. Connectors include AWS, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud PubSub, HBase, Hive, JDBC, Kafka, MongoDB, OpenSearch, Prometheus, Pulsar and RabbitMQ. Security requires configuration because SSL/TLS, REST authentication and SQL Gateway authentication are disabled by default. It is available at free under Apache License v2.

RisingWave is a distributed SQL platform for ingesting, transforming, and serving real-time data. Its SQL interface is wire-compatible with PostgreSQL, so PostgreSQL clients, drivers, and tools can connect. New events incrementally refresh materialized views. Barrier-based checkpointing and consistent snapshots support exactly-once processing, while data is persisted in S3-compatible object storage and connector offsets are checkpointed for delivery durability. RisingWave lists 31+ native connectors, including Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Iceberg, Snowflake, BigQuery, S3, Redis, and Elasticsearch. Self-managed deployments are Apache 2.0 open source, with Docker, Kubernetes, cloud VM, and on-premises options. The hosted Basic plan is $0.23 a month, pay-as-you-go, limited to 64 cores and available in select regions; a free plan and 7-day trial are also listed. Basic includes standard support. Premium 24x7 support can be purchased with Pro, while self-managed deployments offer premium support with an SLA and quarterly success reviews. Listed platforms include API, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, and web.