Mahesh Chand Kandpal contrasts Kafka Streams with Spark Streaming:
The low latency and an easy-to-use event time support also apply to Kafka Streams. It is a rather focused library, and it’s very well-suited for certain types of tasks. That’s also why some of its design can be so optimized for how Kafka works. You don’t need to set up any kind of special Kafka Streams cluster, and there is no cluster manager. And if you need to do a simple Kafka topic-to-topic transformation, count elements by key, enrich a stream with data from another topic, or run an aggregation or only real-time processing — Kafka Streams is for you.
If event time is not relevant and latencies in the seconds range are acceptable, Spark is the first choice. It is stable and almost any type of system can be easily integrated. In addition it comes with every Hadoop distribution. Furthermore, the code used for batch applications can also be used for the streaming applications as the API is the same.
Read on for more analysis.