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Glam Journal

Is StreamSets an ETL tool?

Author

David Craig

Updated on March 02, 2026

Is StreamSets an ETL tool?

Is StreamSets an ETL Tool or a Data Ingest Tool? Yes and yes. As data infrastructures moved to cloud-based systems and Apache Spark enabled massive processing power, our customers kept pace with the change by putting the processing power of Spark in the hands of every developer in support of ETL and ML pipelines.

What is the difference between Kafka and StreamSets?

StreamSets can read from and write to Kafka. StreamSets does not store the data in its own system while Kafka stores the data for a configurable period of time.

What is Apache StreamSets?

StreamSets Transformer Engine is a data pipeline engine designed for any developer or data engineer (with or without Scala or Python skills) to build ETL and ML pipelines that execute on Apache Spark.

What is StreamSets data collector?

StreamSets Data Collector Engine is an easy-to-use data pipeline engine for streaming, CDC and batch ingestion from any source to any destination. “Data Collector Helps Speed Up Development Time.”

Are StreamSets free?

StreamSets provides a 30-day free trial.

Who uses StreamSets?

Who uses StreamSets? 3 companies reportedly use StreamSets in their tech stacks, including Leveris, bigspark, and VnTravel.

Does StreamSets use Kafka?

StreamSets helps customers ease the the burden of hand coding Apache Kafka pipelines. More than just a supported source and destination, Kafka has become a canonical component of modern pipelines that need to scale across the business.

Are StreamSets open source?

StreamSets Data Collector is open source under Apache License 2.0 and a powerful design and execution engine. It enables reading data from an edge device or receiveing data from another dataflow pipeline. It supports messaging protocols including HTTP, MQTT, CoAP, and WebSockets.

Is StreamSets data collector free?

Hi! You can use the open source, standalone version of StreamSets Data Collector for free.

How do I start StreamSets?

Quick Start Guide and Data Collector Installation Video Use your StreamSets Account and download the tarball. Download and install Java 8 JDK or OpenJDK 8. (You must have Java 8 JDK, not Java 8 JRE.) Open the terminal window and set your file descriptors limit to at least 32768.

What is Cafca?

Kafka is primarily used to build real-time streaming data pipelines and applications that adapt to the data streams. It combines messaging, storage, and stream processing to allow storage and analysis of both historical and real-time data.

Why Kafka is so fast?

Compression & Batching of Data: Kafka batches the data into chunks which helps in reducing the network calls and converting most of the random writes to sequential ones. It’s more efficient to compress a batch of data as compared to compressing individual messages.