Trade-offs

Benefits

Flexibility by Filter Exchange

Filters have a simple interface that allows their easy exchange within a processing pipeline. [1]

Flexibility through Composability

This major benefit, combined with the reusability of filter components, allows you to create new processing pipelines by rearranging filters or by adding new ones. [1]

A pipeline without a data source or sink can be embedded as a filter within a larger pipeline. [1]

Rapid prototyping of pipelines

Reusability and Composability make it easy to prototype a data-processing system from existing filters. [1]

Drawbacks

Sharing state information is expensive or inflexible

If your processing stages need to share a large amount of global data, applying the Pipes and Filters pattern is either inefficient or does not provide the full benefits of the pattern. [1]

Data transformation overhead

A long chain may face certain amount of overhead because the data transmission. If we are using a long chain of filters, we are paying for the gain in flexibility with potentially lower performance due to repeated message transmission.

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References

1. Buschmann, F., Meunier, R., Rohnert, H., Sommerlad, P., & Stal, M. (1996). Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 1: A System of Patterns. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=249013&bw=1