Decodable vs Esper

Decodable is a managed, serverless platform for real-time ETL, ELT, and stream processing, built on Apache Flink and Debezium. It lets teams create pipelines in SQL, Java, or Python and manage them through a UI, CLI, APIs, or dbt. SQL supports transformations, filtering, stateful joins, and complex event processing. Pipelines process data exactly once by default and can resume after a stop or failure. Connectors include Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, Apache Iceberg, and Snowflake, with Debezium-powered change data capture. Teams can use Decodable-hosted infrastructure or a Bring Your Own Cloud deployment. The free plan costs nothing and does not expire or require a credit card; it includes 24 hours or 10GiB of stream retention, 20 streams, and four running tasks. On Demand costs $0.12 a month, billed monthly, and Enterprise costs $0.10 a year, billed annually with committed capacity. Decodable is available via API, web, and self-hosted deployment.

Esper is a language, compiler, and runtime for complex event processing and streaming analytics in Java and .NET. Its Event Processing Language extends SQL with expressions over events and time. The compiler turns EPL into bytecode that can be packaged in JAR files. Esper and NEsper embed inside Java or .NET processes rather than running as standalone servers. The in-memory runtime is described as memory-efficient and low-latency and does not require external storage or services. Adapters handle CSV, JMS, HTTP, Kafka, database, and socket input and output, with JMX metrics exposure. Queries can join event streams with web services and relational databases through SQL-query or method-invocation joins. Esper Enterprise Edition adds scale-out architecture with elastic scaling, load balancing, fault tolerance, and multi-datacenter support using Apache Kafka and Apache Zookeeper. Listed uses include business-process monitoring, financial applications such as fraud detection, network and application monitoring, and sensor networks. Esper 9.0.0 is listed under GNU GPL (GPL v2); commercial redistribution licenses are available. Production support has Bronze, Silver, and Gold levels, plus a Developer Seat for how-to questions.