List of the Top 4 Event Stream Processing Software for Confluent in 2025

Ably stands out as the leading platform for realtime experiences. With more WebSocket connections than any competing pub/sub service, we facilitate connections for over a billion devices each month. Companies rely on us for their essential applications, including chat, notifications, and broadcasts, ensuring that these services run reliably, securely, and at an impressive scale. Our commitment to excellence makes us the preferred choice for businesses seeking to enhance their realtime capabilities.

Apache Kafka® can be incredibly straightforward when equipped with the appropriate tools, and that's precisely why kPow was developed—to enhance the Kafka development process while helping organizations save both time and resources. With kPow, pinpointing the source of production issues becomes a task of mere clicks rather than lengthy hours of investigation. Leveraging features like Data Inspect and kREPL, users can efficiently sift through tens of thousands of messages every second. For those new to Kafka, kPow's distinctive UI facilitates a quick grasp of fundamental Kafka principles, enabling effective upskilling of team members and broadening their understanding of Kafka as a whole. Additionally, kPow is packed with numerous Kafka management functions and monitoring capabilities all bundled into a single Docker Container, providing the flexibility to oversee multiple clusters and schema registries seamlessly, all while allowing for easy installation with just one instance. This comprehensive approach not only streamlines operations but also empowers teams to harness the full potential of Kafka technology.

Enable individuals to effectively delve into and assess streaming data. By organizing, documenting, and sharing your data, you could increase productivity by as much as 95%. Once your data is in hand, you can develop applications designed for practical, real-world scenarios. Establish a data-centric security model to tackle the risks linked to open-source technologies, ensuring that data privacy remains a top priority. In addition, provide secure and user-friendly low-code data pipeline options that improve overall usability. Illuminate all hidden facets and deliver unparalleled transparency into your data and applications. Seamlessly integrate your data mesh and technology stack, which empowers you to confidently leverage open-source solutions in live production environments. Lenses has gained recognition as the leading product for real-time stream analytics, as confirmed by independent third-party assessments. With insights collected from our community and extensive engineering efforts, we have crafted features that enable you to focus on what truly adds value from your real-time data. Furthermore, you can deploy and manage SQL-based real-time applications effortlessly across any Kafka Connect or Kubernetes environment, including AWS EKS, simplifying the process of tapping into your data's potential. This approach not only streamlines operations but also opens the door to new avenues for innovation and growth in your organization. By embracing these strategies, you position yourself to thrive in an increasingly data-driven landscape.

Scale from zero to millions of events each second with Arroyo, which is provided as a single, efficient binary. It can be executed locally on MacOS or Linux for development needs and can be seamlessly deployed into production via Docker or Kubernetes. Arroyo offers a groundbreaking approach to stream processing that prioritizes the ease of real-time operations over conventional batch processing methods. Designed from the ground up, Arroyo enables anyone with a basic knowledge of SQL to construct reliable, efficient, and precise streaming pipelines. This capability allows data scientists and engineers to build robust real-time applications, models, and dashboards without requiring a specialized team focused on streaming. Users can easily perform operations such as transformations, filtering, aggregation, and data stream joining merely by writing SQL, achieving results in less than a second. Additionally, your streaming pipelines are insulated from triggering alerts simply due to Kubernetes deciding to reschedule your pods. With its ability to function in modern, elastic cloud environments, Arroyo caters to a range of setups from simple container runtimes like Fargate to large-scale distributed systems managed with Kubernetes. This adaptability makes Arroyo the perfect option for organizations aiming to refine their streaming data workflows, ensuring that they can efficiently handle the complexities of real-time data processing. Moreover, Arroyo’s user-friendly design helps organizations streamline their operations significantly, leading to an overall increase in productivity and innovation.