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Cloudera DataFlow vs Confluent comparison

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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

Cloudera DataFlow
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
19th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Confluent
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
7th
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 November 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Cloudera DataFlow is 3.2%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 6.1%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Confluent6.1%
Cloudera DataFlow3.2%
Other90.7%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Mohamed-Saied - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Architect at Teradata Corporation
Efficient data integration and workflow scheduling elevate project performance
Cloudera DataFlow is used as an ETL or ELT solution within Cloudera's data pipeline. Our organization heavily relies on it for data ingestion, transformation, and warehousing. It is also used daily for operational tasks, and it integrates well within Cloudera's ecosystem for high performance and…
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

"Cloudera DataFlow is fully compatible with Cloudera's ecosystem and offers high efficiency through native connectors for various ecosystems."
"The most effective features are data management and analytics."
"DataFlow's performance is okay."
"This solution is very scalable and robust."
"The initial setup was not so difficult"
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"The benefit is escaping email communication. Sometimes people ignore emails or put them into spam, but with Confluence, everyone sees the same text at the same time."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."
 

Cons

"It's an outdated legacy product that doesn't meet the needs of modern data analysts and scientists."
"It is not easy to use the R language. Though I don't know if it's possible, I believe it is possible, but it is not the best language for machine learning."
"Although their workflow is pretty neat, it still requires a lot of transformation coding; especially when it comes to Python and other demanding programming languages."
"Cloudera DataFlow's UI interface could be enhanced significantly. Memory handling can also be improved to be better than it is today."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"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."
"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."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"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."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"DataFlow isn't expensive, but its value for money isn't great."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"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."
"It comes with a high cost."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudera DataFlow?
Cloudera DataFlow's UI interface could be enhanced significantly. Memory handling can also be improved to be better than it is today.
What is your primary use case for Cloudera DataFlow?
Cloudera DataFlow is used as an ETL or ELT solution within Cloudera's data pipeline. Our organization heavily relies on it for data ingestion, transformation, and warehousing. It is also used daily...
What advice do you have for others considering Cloudera DataFlow?
Cloudera DataFlow is fully compatible with Cloudera's ecosystem and offers high efficiency through native connectors for various ecosystems. However, the learning curve is high, and there is a shor...
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

CDF, Hortonworks DataFlow, HDF
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Clearsense
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudera DataFlow vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.