Apache Nifi is more of data routing and transformation tool  outside the Hadoop cluster ,it has its own JVM but needs hadoop configuration if you are trying to push data to hdfs. It has many built processor that comes handy for pushing data quickly , nifi community is little big Streamsets is similar , you can deploy inside hadoop cluster and manage using Cloduera manager Apache kafak is again a streaming platform more of real time data just NIFI but if you want to do any aggregation on the fly Apache flume - Flume is also disturbing platform has concept of source - channel - sink . we mostly use to push logs to hdfs ,hbase has many built-in source ,sink and you can create custom one just like nifi processor   if you looking for alternative for Apache Nifi you can use Apache flume, Apache kafaka , streamsets. Each one has its own use case though.   Cloudera Navigator  - Is used for Data management and security under one hood for hadoop platform ... View more