The comparison between Apache Flink and Kafka Streams API highlights their differences in deployment, management, and coordination models. Flink is a cluster framework that takes care of deploying the application, while the Streams API is an embeddable library that can be integrated into any standard Java application. This difference affects the ownership perspective, resource isolation, and separation of concerns between the two systems. The Streams API relies on Kafka's consumer group protocol for distributed coordination and fault tolerance, whereas Flink has a dedicated master node for global coordination. While both systems provide strong guarantees for stream processing, they cater to different use cases and architectural requirements, with Flink being suitable for applications deployed in existing clusters and the Streams API being more accessible as an application programming model for microservices.