StreamNative Recognized as a Contender in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025

Receives Highest Possible Scores in BOTH the Messaging and Resource Optimization Criteria

Introduction

Real-time data has become the backbone of modern innovation. As artificial intelligence (AI) and digital services demand instantaneous insights, organizations are realizing that streaming data is no longer optional – it's essential for delivering timely, context-rich experiences. StreamNative's data streaming platform is built precisely for this reality, ensuring data is immediate, reliable, and ready to power critical applications.

Today, we're excited to announce that Forrester Research has named StreamNative as a Contender in its evaluation, The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025. This report evaluated 15 top streaming data platform providers, and we're proud to share that StreamNative received the highest scores possible—5 out of 5—in both the Messaging and Resource Optimization criteria.

Forrester's Take: "StreamNative is a good fit for enterprises that want an Apache Pulsar implementation that is also compatible with Kafka APIs."

— The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025

Being recognized in the Forrester Wave is a proud milestone, and for us, it highlights how far StreamNative has come in enabling enterprises to unlock the power of real-time data. In the sections below, we'll dive into what we believe sets StreamNative apart—from our modern architecture and cloud-native design to our open-source foundation and real-time use cases—and how we see these strengths aligning with Forrester's findings.

Trusted by Industry Leaders

Companies across industries are already leveraging StreamNative to drive real-time outcomes. Global enterprises like Cisco rely on StreamNative to handle massive IoT telemetry, supporting 245 million+ connected devices. Martech leaders such as Iterable process billions of events per day with StreamNative for hyper-personalized customer engagement. And in financial services, FICO trusts StreamNative to power its real-time fraud detection and analytics pipelines with a secure, scalable streaming backbone.

The Forrester report notes that, “Customers appreciate the lower infrastructure costs that result from StreamNative’s cost-efficient, Kafka-compatible architecture. Customers note excellent support responsiveness…”

Modern, Cloud-Native Architecture Built for Scale

From day one, StreamNative was designed with a modern architecture to meet the demanding scale and flexibility requirements of real-time data. Unlike legacy streaming systems that often rely on tightly coupled storage and compute, StreamNative's platform takes a cloud-native approach: it decouples these layers to enable elastic scalability and efficient resource utilization across any environment. The core is powered by Apache Pulsar—a distributed messaging and streaming engine—enhanced with multi-protocol support (including native Apache Kafka API compatibility) to unify diverse data streams under one roof. This means organizations can consolidate siloed messaging systems and handle both high-volume event streams and traditional message queues on a single platform, without sacrificing performance or reliability.

Forrester's evaluation described that “StreamNative aims to provide a high-performance, multi-protocol streaming data platform: It uses Apache Pulsar with Kafka API compatibility to deliver cost-efficient, real-time applications for enterprises. It appeals to organizations that want a flexible, low-cost streaming solution, due to its focus on scalability and resource optimization, while its investments in Pulsar’s open-source ecosystem and performance optimization make it the primary platform for enterprises wishing to implement Pulsar.”

Our cloud-first, leaderless architecture (with no single broker bottlenecks) and tiered storage model were built to maximize throughput and cost-efficiency for real-time workloads. By separating compute from storage and leveraging distributed object storage, StreamNative can retain huge volumes of event data indefinitely while keeping compute costs in check—effectively providing a flexible, low-cost streaming solution.

This modern design not only delivers high performance, but also ensures fault tolerance and geo-distribution out of the box, so enterprises can trust their streaming data is always available and durable. As Forrester’s evaluation noted, StreamNative "excels at messaging and resource optimization" and “Its platform supports use cases like real-time analytics and event-driven architectures with robust scalability.” Our architecture provides the strong foundation that today's real-time applications demand, from ultra-fast data ingestion to seamless scale-out across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Open Source Foundation and Pulsar Expertise

StreamNative's DNA is rooted in open source innovation. Our founders are the original creators of Apache Pulsar, and we've built our platform with the same open principles: freedom, flexibility, and community-driven innovation. For developers and data teams, this means adopting StreamNative comes with no proprietary lock-in—instead, you get a platform built on open standards and a thriving ecosystem. We offer broad API compatibility (Pulsar, Kafka, JMS, MQTT, and more) so that teams can work with familiar interfaces and integrate StreamNative into existing systems with ease.

StreamNative is the primary commercial contributor to the Apache Pulsar project and its surrounding ecosystem. We invest heavily in Pulsar's ongoing improvements our investments in Pulsar's open-source ecosystem and performance optimization bolster StreamNative's value. We also foster a vibrant community through initiatives like the Data Streaming Summit and free training resources.

Forrester's assessment noted that StreamNative’s “events-driven agents, extensibility, and performance architecture are solid,” and we're continuing to build on that foundation. We're actively investing in expanding our tooling for observability, governance, schema management, and developer productivity—areas we recognize as critical for enterprise adoption and where we're committed to accelerating our roadmap.

Being open also means embracing an open ecosystem of technologies. StreamNative actively integrates with the tools and platforms that matter most to our users. We partner with industry leaders like Snowflake, Databricks, Google, and Ververica to ensure our streaming platform works seamlessly with data warehouses, lakehouse storage, and stream processing frameworks. Forrester’s evaluation observed that StreamNative’s "investments in Pulsar’s open-source ecosystem and performance optimization make it the primary platform for enterprises wishing to implement Pulsar."

Powering Real-Time Use Cases Across Industries

One of the greatest validations of StreamNative's approach is the success our customers are achieving with real-time data. StreamNative's platform is versatile and use-case agnostic—if an application demands high-volume, low-latency data movement, we can power it. This flexibility is why our customer base spans industries from finance and IoT to major automobile manufacturers and online gaming. The common thread is that these organizations need to process and react to data in milliseconds, and StreamNative is delivering the capabilities to make that possible.

Cisco uses StreamNative to underpin an IoT telemetry system of colossal scale, connecting hundreds of millions of devices and thousands of enterprise clients with real-time data streams. The platform's multi-tenant design and proven reliability allow Cisco to offer its customers a live feed of device data with unwavering confidence. In the financial sector, FICO has built streaming pipelines on StreamNative to detect fraud as transactions happen and to monitor systems in real time. With StreamNative's strong guarantees around message durability and ordering, FICO can catch anomalies or suspicious patterns within seconds. And in digital customer engagement, Iterable relies on StreamNative to process billions of events every day—clicks, views, purchases—so that marketers can trigger personalized campaigns instantly based on user behavior.

Our customers uniformly deal with mission-critical data streams, where downtime or delays are unacceptable. StreamNative's fault-tolerant, scalable infrastructure has proven equal to the task, handling scenarios like bursting to millions of events per second or seamlessly spanning multiple cloud regions. Forrester's report recognized StreamNative for supporting event-driven architectures with robust scalability—which for us is a reflection of our platform's ability to meet the most demanding enterprise requirements.

Continuing to Innovate: Ursa, Orca, and the Road Ahead

While we are thrilled to be recognized in Forrester's Streaming Data Platforms Wave, we view this as just the beginning. StreamNative's vision has always been bold: to provide a unified platform that not only handles today's streaming needs but also anticipates the emerging requirements of tomorrow.

One key area of focus is the convergence of streaming data with advanced analytics and AI. As Forrester points out in the report, technology leaders should look for platforms that natively integrate messaging, stream processing, and analytics to provide AI agents with real-time, contextualized information. We couldn't agree more. Our award-winning Ursa Engine and Orca Agent Engine are aimed at extending our platform up the stack—bridging the gap between data streams and data lakes, and between event streams and intelligent processing.

Our new Ursa Engine introduces a lakehouse-native approach to streaming: it can write events directly to table formats like Iceberg on cloud storage, eliminating entire classes of ETL jobs and making fresh data instantly available for analytics queries. By integrating streaming and lakehouse technologies, we help customers collapse data silos and accelerate their AI/ML pipelines.

Beyond analytics integration, we are also enhancing StreamNative with more out-of-the-box processing and governance capabilities. In the coming months, we plan to introduce new features for lightweight stream processing and transformation, making it easier to build reactive applications directly on the platform. We're also expanding our ecosystem of connectors and integrations, so that whether your data lands in Snowflake, Databricks, or an AI model, StreamNative will seamlessly feed it. We're investing significantly in enterprise features including security, schema registry, governance, and monitoring tooling—capabilities that are essential for mission-critical deployments and where we're committed to continued improvement.

This recognition from Forrester energizes us to keep innovating at full speed. We're sharing this honor with our amazing customers, community, and partners who drive us forward every day. Your feedback and real-world challenges have helped shape StreamNative into what it is today, and together, we will shape the future of streaming data. Thank you for joining us on this journey—we're just getting started, and we can't wait to deliver even more value as we continue to evolve our platform. Onward to real-time everything!

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StreamNative in The Forrester Wave™: Evaluation Findings

• Recognized as a Contender among 15 streaming data platform providers

* Received the highest scores possible (5.0) in both the Messaging and Resource Optimization criteria

• Cited as the primary platform for enterprises wishing to implement Pulsar

• Noted for excelling at messaging and resource optimization

• Customers cited lower infrastructure costs and excellent support responsiveness

• Recognized for supporting event-driven architectures with robust scalability

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Forrester Disclaimer: Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.

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