Apache Samza vs Apache Spark
Apache Samza
samza.apache.org
Apache Spark
spark.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Apache Samza | Apache Spark |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Streaming Analytics Software | 7.8 (#11) | 8.1 (#5) |
| Spec score · Stream Processing Software | 7.8 (#13) | 8.2 (#7) |
| Spec score · Stream Analytics Software | 7.9 (#14) | 8.2 (#7) |
| Spec score · Big Data Analytics Software | 7.8 (#18) | 8.1 (#13) |
| Deployment | Samza supports deployment on YARN, Kubernetes, or as a standalone library, and its documentation describes running applications across public clouds, containerized environments, and bare-metal hardware. | Spark documents standalone, Hadoop YARN, and Kubernetes deployment options. |
| Founded | 2013 | 2009 |
| Integrations | Built-in integrations include Apache Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Azure Event Hubs, Elasticsearch, and Apache Hadoop, and custom sources can also be integrated. | The listed ecosystem includes pandas, TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, Delta Lake, and Apache Iceberg. |
| Purpose | Apache Samza is a distributed stream-processing framework for building stateful applications that process data in real time from multiple sources. | Apache Spark is a unified engine for large-scale data analytics. |
| Security | The background documentation says Samza works with YARN, which supports Hadoop’s security model, and uses Linux cgroups for resource isolation. | Security features such as authentication are not enabled by default, and the documentation says deployments are not secure by default. |
| Support | The project directs users to a user mailing list subscribed to by Samza users, contributors, and committers. | The project directs users to mailing lists and community resources for help. |
Plans
In their own words
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.
Apache Spark
Apache Spark is a free, open-source engine for large-scale data analytics. It processes batches and real-time streams using Python, SQL, Scala, Java, or R. Spark SQL runs distributed ANSI SQL queries on structured tables and unstructured data such as JSON or images; MLlib provides machine-learning algorithms for local use or cluster scale. The project also describes exploratory analysis on petabyte-scale data without downsampling. Listed ecosystem components include pandas, TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, Delta Lake, and Apache Iceberg. Deployment options include standalone, Hadoop YARN, and Kubernetes. Spark runs on Windows and UNIX-like systems, including Linux and macOS, when a supported Java version is available. The 4.2.0 documentation lists Java 17, 21, or 25, Scala 2.13, Python 3.10+, and R 4.0+ (deprecated). Spark Connect separates client applications from clusters for remote access. Security is not enabled by default; Spark supports TLS for RPC connections and encryption of temporary local-disk data. The project is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0.