Apache Samza vs RisingWave
Apache Samza
samza.apache.org
RisingWave
risingwave.comSide by side
| Figure | Apache Samza | RisingWave |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.23/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Streaming Analytics Software | 7.8 (#11) | 8.1 (#6) |
| Spec score · Stream Processing Software | 7.8 (#13) | 8.0 (#11) |
| Spec score · Stream Analytics Software | 7.9 (#14) | 8.0 (#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. | Self-managed deployments support Docker, Kubernetes with Helm charts, cloud VMs, and on-premises bare-metal servers. |
| Founded | 2013 | 2021 |
| Security | The background documentation says Samza works with YARN, which supports Hadoop’s security model, and uses Linux cgroups for resource isolation. | RisingWave security guidance covers TLS/SSL in transit, S3 encryption at rest, certificate or password authentication, role-based grants, and SQL-based data masking. |
| Support | The project directs users to a user mailing list subscribed to by Samza users, contributors, and committers. | RisingWave offers standard support on Basic, premium 24x7 support as an option on Pro, and premium support with SLA and quarterly success reviews for self-managed deployments. |
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.
RisingWave
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.