Apache Samza vs Materialize

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.

Materialize is a live data layer for apps and AI agents that uses SQL to create up-to-the-second views. Rather than rebuilding query results from scratch as data arrives, it updates them incrementally. Connected sources appear as continually updating tables with sub-second freshness. SQL features include multi-way, lateral, and outer joins, recursive SQL, and SUBSCRIBE, which streams query-result changes over a standard Postgres connection.

Materialize is wire-compatible with PostgreSQL and supports clients and tools that work with PostgreSQL. Listed integrations include PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, CockroachDB, Kafka, Model Context Protocol, dbt, and webhooks such as EventBridge and Segment. Transformed updates can go to downstream systems including Kafka and Apache Iceberg. It is available as managed Cloud, self-managed Kubernetes software, and a Docker-based local development Emulator. The free self-managed Community Edition is limited to 24 GiB memory and 48 GiB disk. Cloud On-Demand is $1.50 a month, with usage-based compute, storage, and networking; Cloud Capacity is $1.50 a year, with storage and networking billed separately.