But none of them spell out for what use cases they excel over the other options. Since they are all under the ASF banner, it’s impossible to know which is “better” for me. They are all just “great stream processing engines”. But surely they must have diverging properties for given use cases. But none of the pages even attempt to say how they differ. Just “try it out!!”
Years ago, I found a scientific paper that evaluated them all on a fairly detailed rubric. As I recall, it turned out that they're all, in actual fact, crap stream processing engines. You just need to pick the one that's crap at things you don't need to do.
(I could frame it in a more glass half full way, but I find that the pessimistic way of looking at it helps a lot with trimming down options when you have far, far, far too many options.)
I've long since lost track of it. It would be 5 or 6 years out of date at this point, anyway, so probably not very useful for informing decisions anymore.
I've just accepted that mindset as a part of the art of engineering. Shifting the inherent crappiness of a domain around to where it doesn't matter as much for your use case.
