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Apache Kafka vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Apache Kafka
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Confluent
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Kafka is 4.0%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 6.6%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apache Kafka4.0%
Confluent6.6%
Other89.4%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Bruno da Silva - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Timestamp, SA
Have worked closely with the team to deploy streaming and transaction pipelines in a flexible cloud environment
The interface of Apache Kafka could be significantly better. I started working with Apache Kafka from its early days, and I have seen many improvements. The back office functionality could be enhanced. Scaling up continues to be a challenge, though it is much easier now than it was in the beginning.
PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo
Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing
I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the documentation, which is good and clear."
"Kafka provides us with a way to store the data used for analytics."
"Apache Kafka is particularly valuable for stream data processing, handling transactions, managing high levels of transactions, and orchestrating stream mode data."
"For example, when you want to send a message to inform all your clients about a new feature, you can publish that message to a single topic in Apache Kafka. This allows all clients subscribed to that topic to receive the message. On the other hand, if you need to send billing information to a specific customer, you can publish that message on a topic dedicated to that customer. This message can then be sent as an SMS to the customer, allowing them to view it on their mobile device."
"The high availability is valuable, it is robust, and we can rely on it for a huge amount of data."
"Apache Kafka is one of the best open-source solutions that are available today."
"Some of the clusters churn millions of records per seconds with ease."
"Overall, I rate Apache Kafka as nine out of ten for its scalability and stability."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided; they're leading the market in this category."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
 

Cons

"The GUI tools for monitoring and support are still very basic and not very rich. There is no help in determining a shard key for performance."
"Too much dependency on the zookeeper and leader selection is still the bottleneck for Kafka implementation."
"Data pulling and restart ability need improving."
"The manageability should be improved. There are lots of things we need to manage and it should have a function that enables us to manage them all cohesively."
"Kafka has a lot of monitors, but sometimes it's most important to just have a simple monitor."
"The graphical user environment is currently lacking."
"For personal preferences, since we use Managed Kafka in AWS, I would appreciate having some kind of UI integrated into Apache Kafka for connecting to it because using code to connect it is basic, but we can use a UI."
"The product could be improved with proper documentation."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"Confluent has fallen behind in being the tool of the industry. It's taking second place to things such as Word and SharePoint and other office tools that are more dynamic and flexible than Confluent."
"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"The product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."
"Currently, in the early stages, I see a gap on the security side. If you are using the SaaS version, we would like to get a fuller, more secure solution that can be adopted right out of the box. Confluence could do a better job sharing best practices or a reusable pattern that others have used, especially for companies that can not afford to hire professional services from Confluent."
"The beginner who doesn't know how to work on HTML will struggle as when you create spaces in the Confluent, if you want to have some meeting notes or anything else, you need to know HTML and which HTML tags to include."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Running a Kafka cluster can be expensive, especially if you need to scale it up to handle large amounts of data."
"I was using the product's free version."
"It's quite affordable considering the value it provides."
"The solution is open source; it's free to use."
"Apache Kafka is free."
"Licensing issues are not applicable. Apache licensing makes it simple with almost zero cost for the software itself."
"This is an open-source solution and is free to use."
"Apache Kafka is an open-source solution and there are no fees, but there are fees associated with confluence, which are based on subscription."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate Confluent's pricing at five. I have not encountered any additional costs."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"The pricing model of Confluent could improve because if you have a classic use case where you're going to use all the features there is no plan to reduce the features. You should be able to pick and choose basic services at a reduced price. The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise50
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?
Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data used for analytics. Apache Kafka is very good if you have a high number of user...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Kafka?
Its pricing is reasonable. It's not always about cost, but about meeting specific needs.
What needs improvement with Apache Kafka?
The long-term data storage feature in Apache Kafka depends on the setting, but I believe the maximum duration is seven days.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?
They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.
What needs improvement with Confluent?
I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about ...
What is your primary use case for Confluent?
The main use cases for Confluent are log aggregation and streaming. I'm familiar with Confluent stream processing with KSQL. KSQL helps in terms of data analytics strategies because if we are the d...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Netflix, Activision, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Kafka vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.