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Apache Spark Streaming 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 Spark Streaming
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
17
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 Spark Streaming is 4.4%, up from 2.6% 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 (%)
Confluent6.6%
Apache Spark Streaming4.4%
Other89.0%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Himansu Jena - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Project Manager at Raj Subhatech
Efficient real-time data management and analysis with advanced features
There are various ways we can improve Apache Spark Streaming through best practices. The initial part requires attention to batch interval tuning, which helps small intervals in micro batches based on latency requirements and helps prevent back pressure. We can use data formats such as Parquet or ORC for storage that needs faster reads and leveraging feature predicate push-down optimizations. We can implement serialization which helps with any Kyro in terms of .NET or Java. We have boxing and unboxing serialization for XML and JSON for converting key-pair values stored in browser. We can also implement caching mechanisms for storing and recomputing multiple operations. We can use specified joins which help with smaller databases, and distributed joins can minimize users. We can implement project optimization memory for CPU efficiency, known as Tungsten. Additionally, load balancing, checkpointing, and schema evaluation are areas to consider based on performance and bottlenecks. We can use Bugzilla tools for tracking and Splunk to monitor the performance of process systems, utilization, and performance based on data frames or data sets.
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

"With Apache Spark Streaming, you can have multiple kinds of windows; depending on your use case, you can select either a tumbling window, a sliding window, or a static window to determine how much data you want to process at a single point of time."
"The platform’s most valuable feature for processing real-time data is its ability to handle continuous data streams."
"The solution is better than average and some of the valuable features include efficiency and stability."
"The solution is very stable and reliable."
"I appreciate Apache Spark Streaming's micro-batching capabilities; the watermarking functionality and related features are quite good."
"The solution is better than average and some of the valuable features include efficiency and stability."
"As an open-source solution, using it is basically free."
"Apache Spark Streaming's most valuable feature is near real-time analytics, as developers can build APIs easily for a code-steaming pipeline and the solution has an ecosystem of integration with other stock services."
"The biggest benefit of Confluent as a tool is that it is a distributed platform that provides more durability and stability."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"The most valuable feature that we are using is the data replication between the data centers allowing us to configure a disaster recovery or software. However, is it's not mandatory to use and because most of the features that we use are from Apache Kafka, such as end-to-end encryption. Internally, we can develop our own kind of product or service from Apache Kafka."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent. The other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"I would rate the scalability of the solution at eight out of ten. We have 20 people who use Confluent in our organization now, and we hope to increase usage in the future."
"Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent."
 

Cons

"We would like to have the ability to do arbitrary stateful functions in Python."
"When dealing with various data types including COBOL, Excel, JSON, video, audio, and MPG files, challenges can arise with incomplete or missing values."
"The downside is when you have this the other way around in the columns, it becomes really hard to use."
"One improvement I would expect is real-time processing instead of micro-batch or near real-time."
"In terms of improvement, the UI could be better."
"Integrating event-level streaming capabilities could be beneficial."
"One improvement I would expect is real-time processing instead of micro-batch or near real-time."
"The service structure of Apache Spark Streaming can improve. There are a lot of issues with memory management and latency. There is no real-time analytics. We recommend it for the use cases where there is a five-second latency, but not for a millisecond, an IOT-based, or the detection anomaly-based. Flink as a service is much better."
"It could have more themes. They should also have more reporting-oriented plugins as well. It would be great to have free custom reports that can be dispatched directly from Jira."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"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."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"The solution could have an extra plugin or upgrading feature. In addition, it could have more integration with different platforms and be more compatible."
"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive, or not cost-effective, and ten is cheap, I rate the price a seven."
"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."
"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."
"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Regarding pricing, I think Confluent is a premium product, but it's hard for me to say definitively if it's overly expensive. We're still trying to understand if the features and reduced maintenance complexity justify the cost, especially as we scale our platform use."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
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 Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Apache Spark Streaming?
One of the improvements we need is in Spark SQL and the machine learning library. I don't think there is too much to work on, but the issue is when we want to use machine learning, we always need t...
What is your primary use case for Apache Spark Streaming?
We work with Apache Spark Streaming for our project because we use that as one of the landing data sources, and we work with it to ensure we can get all of the data before it goes through our data ...
What advice do you have for others considering Apache Spark Streaming?
One thing I would share with other organizations considering Apache Spark Streaming is the necessity of having effective data storage. We want to ensure we acquire and manage our data storage effec...
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...
 

Also Known As

Spark Streaming
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, eBay Inc.
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark Streaming vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.