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AWS Glue vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

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

AWS Glue
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (1st)
Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

Saurabh Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables seamless integration and data preparation with robust transformation capabilities
AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models. It offers transformation options on canvas or through ETL pipelines, notebooks, and code. Additionally, it supports data preparation, cleaning, and filtering seamlessly. AWS Glue also enhances job scheduling and orchestration capabilities, integrating with AWS Glue Studio for comprehensive data workflow management.
PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"For ETL, I feel the performance is excellent."
"The most valuable feature for me is the visual interface of AWS Glue."
"AWS Glue's most valuable features are the data catalog, including crawlers and tables, and Glue Studio, which means you don't have to use custom code."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is its ease of use and good documentation. Additionally, we can do all the transformations that we need."
"It is AWS-integrated. There is end-to-end integration with the other AWS services. It is also user-friendly."
"The AWS Glue Data Catalog provides metadata management and schema discovery. AWS Glue simplifies data transformation with automatic schema detection, incremental data updates, and integration with other AWS services."
"Our entire use case was very easily handled or solved using this solution."
"I like its integration and ability to handle all data-related tasks."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"The biggest benefit of Confluent as a tool is that it is a distributed platform that provides more durability and stability."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"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."
"Some of the best features are that it's very quick to set up, very easy to have a centralized area that gives us a history of changes, and the ability to give feedback on any information placed onto the pages."
"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 point for improvement in AWS Glue would be the dynamic allocation of resources while utilizing Lambda functions."
"One area that could be improved is the ETL view. The drag-and-drop interface is not as user-friendly as some other ETL tools."
"Overall, I consider the technical support to be fine, although the response time could be faster in certain cases."
"AWS Glue should be more reliable and faster in processing. Enhancing the speed of data processing would be beneficial."
"There could be an enhanced way of managing pure metadata management or data cataloging."
"The technical support for this solution could be improved. In future, we would like to connect more services like Athena or Kinesis to help control more loads of data."
"The product has only a few built-in transformations."
"I haven't looked into Glue in terms of seeking out flaws. I've not come across missing features."
"One area we've identified that could be improved is the governance and access control to the Kafka topics. We've found some limitations, like a threshold of 10,000 rules per cluster, that make it challenging to manage access at scale if we have many different data sources."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"The Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the tool an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is expensive."
"This solution is affordable and there is an option to pay for the solution based on your usage."
"If you are using the solution for an enterprise business, it will be expensive."
"AWS Glue uses a pay-as-you-go approach which is helpful. The price of the overall solution is low and is a great advantage."
"AWS Glue is quite costly, especially for small organizations."
"AWS Glue is a high-priced solution that bills the client $150,000 to $250,000 annually."
"AWS Glue follows a pay-as-you-go model, wherein the cost of the data you use will be counted as a monthly bill."
"I rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten."
"Confluence's pricing is quite reasonable, with a cost of around $10 per user that decreases as the number of users increases. Additionally, it's worth noting that for teams of up to 10 users, the solution is completely free."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"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 highly priced."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?
AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.
How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?
We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...
What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?
AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...
What do you like most about Confluent?
I find Confluent's Kafka Connectors and Kafka Streams invaluable for my use cases because they simplify real-time data processing and ETL tasks by providing reliable, pre-packaged connectors and to...
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?
People do not appreciate that Confluent is pushing us more towards Teams because they want to use a true Microsoft Word-type format where we can format our sentences better, instead of just saying ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Glue vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.