Apache Flink is one of the most capable distributed stream processing frameworks available today. I particularly like its event-time processing, exactly-once state consistency, checkpointing, savepoints, stateful operators, CEP (Complex Event Processing), and support for both streaming and batch workloads through a unified execution engine.

Performance has been excellent for high-throughput, low-latency processing of millions of events per second. The Web UI provides useful operational visibility into job execution, checkpoint status, task managers, and resource utilization. Flink integrates extremely well with modern data lake architectures, Kafka ecosystems, and cloud-native platforms. For organizations building real-time analytics, fraud detection, IoT processing, or CDC pipelines, it offers excellent scalability and reliability. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

he learning curve is considerably steeper than traditional batch processing frameworks. Stateful stream processing, watermarking, checkpoint tuning, and job recovery require a solid understanding of Flink internals. Debugging distributed streaming applications can also be challenging. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Apache Flink solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apache Flink enabled us to process streaming business events in real time instead of relying on scheduled ETL jobs.

Example: CDC events from operational databases were streamed through Kafka into Flink, where they were enriched, validated, aggregated, and written into Apache Iceberg tables. Business dashboards were updated within seconds instead of waiting for hourly data pipelines, significantly improving operational visibility. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Telecommunications

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

5/20/2024

"Distributed Data Streaming Engine"

5/5

What do you like best about Apache Flink?

First of all it is easy to setup in kubernetes using flink operator and it simply integrates to kubenetes as a native api supports high availability out of the box with kubernetes. community developed flink to process continuous stream of data at lightning fast Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

As a user I dont find any difficulties or challenge and community does release softeware very oftem thus improvess the stability Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gaurav M.

Data engineer

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

8/3/2023

"Flink - Fastest Realtime Stream Processing Engine"

5/5

What do you like best about Apache Flink?

I really like the table APIs provided by Apache Flink. It is very easy to do simple transformations on top of a Kafka table via Flink SQL query. Apart from that, the community is present on Slack in case of user issues.

It provides multiple ways to deploy Flink on cloud like K8s, standalone modes etc.

Also metrics that are internally provides by flink help us a lot in debugging Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

Advanced Datastream API like a broadcast stream, and process functions are not documented properly, more examples of datastream API should be present in doc Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ketan C.

IT Administrator

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

7/4/2022

"One of the best backend processing frameworks"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Apache Flink?

it is open-source, user friendly and easy to install and configure, its checkpoint feature Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

yet i didn't found anything that i dislike in flink Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sachin K.

Freelancer

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

5/17/2022

"Apache Flink - Stateful Computations over Data Streams"

5/5

What do you like best about Apache Flink?

The feature of Stateful Computations over Data Streams Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

It is primarily focused on streaming use cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Yogesh B.

Technical Lead

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

5/18/2021

"Highly scalable distributed processing engine"

5/5

What do you like best about Apache Flink?

It supports both stateful and stateless computations on streams Supports both batch mode and real-time analytics Has proven to be high performing, less memory-hungry compared to the storm It has capability to do windowing, machine learning integration etc., It is highly scalable It also has capability to process event may be do aggregation or windowing based on event occurrence time than the processing time Has Exactly-once state consistency Also supports handling late data through some threshold window Can do in memory SQL on streams Flink UI is very user friendly Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

There is not much to dislike. It has capabilities of both storm and spark. If you know storm and spark it's easy to use Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Apache Flink:

Use it wisely, tune the memory parameters and parallelism wisely. Otherwise you end up back pressure or under utilising the resources Lot of tuning with respect to num of threads and memory allotment is required do not overwrite the processors, which will lead to a lot of parallelism and simply data transfer between the nodes and can lead to slow down Need to archirect cautiously Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Apache Flink solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use flink for both online streaming and offline batch processing Mainly to enrich the incoming data, integrated with elastic search to store it. We also do aggregation using tumbling winfdow. We use flink views For batch processing, we do use to learn some thresholds, like cpu, memory thresholds etc., Deployed with 100's of nodes, highly scalable deployed in aws using kubernetese container We also use flink ui to debug high level issues We dont do sql on streaming Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gunjan K.

Member Of Technical Staff-II

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

8/30/2020

"Apache Flink"

5/5

What do you like best about Apache Flink?

Apache Flink is the only true open source streaming engine available, exactly-once delivery, real-time persistent snapshots. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

Fewer production deployments than other frameworks like Spark. But as I understand, it's way better than Spark. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Apache Flink:

Highly Recommended, Apache Flink is the only true streaming solution. Include all the features a true streaming system should have. Exactly-once delivery, real-time persistent snapshots very useful for upgrading Apache Flink and fixing any buggy code. Very low latency because of true stream processing as compared to other streaming frameworks. Supports batch processing on top of the stream processing engine. The only concern is fewer production deployments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Apache Flink solving and how is that benefiting you?

IoT data processing and Analytics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Kumar Ritesh Ranjan S.

Grader

Internet

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

1/18/2019

"Apache Flink - Ideal framework for realtime data processing"

5/5

What do you like best about Apache Flink?

The framework is very easy to learn. It is very similar to the apache spark framework, so projects can be migrated pretty easily and the learning curve is not much. Pretty fast compared to other real-time frameworks. Comes with a lot of inbuilt connectors with third-party messaging queues and database. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

I don't have anything in particular to dislike but it is very similar to another real-time framework like Apache Spark. So, I think there should be some unique features added to it, in order to make it favorite framework among all. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Apache Flink:

Similar to other real-time frameworks. Go ahead and use it to check if it fits your requirement. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Apache Flink solving and how is that benefiting you?

We built a real-time data pipeline to process a huge amount of data, which was then used by many teams for their use-cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Austin C.

Community Organizer + Hackathon Co-Founder

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

11/25/2018

"Robust, Supportive Community, Challenging but Improving Deployments"

4/5

What do you like best about Apache Flink?

The API is intuitive and flexible enough for all use cases we had. The support from dataArtisans and the mailing list they monitor makes using the platform much safer in an enterprise setting - we would have been lost without their support, often within the same day. Resources can be found on their Community page at https://flink.apache.org/community.html. We also love the blog posts put out by dataArtisans of real case studies. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

Deploying was easy enough for the basic case, but understanding the Hadoop / YARN ecosystem in conjunction with Flink, and creating a stable + scalable cluster, has been challenging. This is not so much a fault of Flink, but they are working to make it easier to deploy across a variety of platforms. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Apache Flink:

Definitely research the entire Apache BigData ecosystem - you'll save time and pain if you understand the core architecture before you start building. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Apache Flink solving and how is that benefiting you?

We've created a real-time big data processor, which can handle hundreds of thousands of messages a day and scale up to hundred of millions a day when necessary. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Aadhyatm V.

Company Owner

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/21/2019

"Awesome Software"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Apache Flink?

User Friendly and gives great amount of format and supported features Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Apache Flink?

Less community and forums for discussion Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Apache Flink:

A great software for back end work by such great company Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Apache Flink solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apache Flink is an open source stream processing framework developed by the Apache Software Foundation. The core of Apache Flink is a distributed streaming dataflow engine written in Java and Scala. Flink executes arbitrary dataflow programs in a data-parallel and pipelined manner. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.