Confluent vs Fivetran comparison

Confluent and Fivetran are both solutions in the Cloud Data Integration category. Additionally, 95% of Confluent users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Fivetran users who would recommend it.

Confluent

Read 23 Confluent reviews

4,827 Views
3,652 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Fivetran

Read 25 Fivetran reviews

1,822 Views
1,315 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Confluent

Fivetran

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Confluent and Fivetran based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Data Integration solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Confluent vs. Fivetran Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. Fivetran

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 845,406 peers since 2012

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

Confluent

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (4th)

Fivetran

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (12th), Data Replication (3rd), Cloud Data Integration (8th)

Featured Reviews

Yantao Zhao

Software Integration Engineer at Thales

Great tool for sharing knowledge, internal communication and allows for real-time collaboration on pages

Confluence is easy to use and modify. However, sometimes there are too many pages. We have to reorganize the folder or parent account. Since everyone can create a page, the same knowledge might be created in multiple places by different people. This leads to redundancy and makes it difficult to find information. It's not centralized. So it could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful. It's very easy to use, so everyone can create knowledge. But it would be good to synchronize and organize that information a bit better. Another improvement would be in Confluence search. You can search for keywords, but it's not like AI, not even ChatGPT or OpenAI. It would be nice to get more relevant or organized answers. If you're outside the company, you just get some titles containing the keyword you input. But if Confluence were like a database, you could input something and get a well-organized search offering from multiple pages.

Read full review

Erik Jones

Head of BI and Analytics at HyperScience

Solution reduces time-to-value; high ROI

Fivetran has room for improvement in data pipeline observability. The Fivetran logs are fairly basic, compared to, for example, the insight Fivetran gives into helping users understanding the performance of data pipelines. So I think their observability into the pipeline itself could be improved. In addition, Fivetran is in the very early stages of allowing other companies to access its metadata API, but that's something that could use improvement, and I know that they're working on right now. We use a separate tool for "reverse ETL", which is the opposite of what Fivetran does; it pushes data from your data warehouse back out to business applications. If Fivetran pulls data from those same applications, they should also enable users to push it back. I would love to do both ETL and reverse ETL in the same tool. It would be nice if Fivetran offered both their regular offering plus the reverse ETL option as well.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."

"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."

"The documentation process is fast with the tool."

"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 most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."

"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."

"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."

"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."

More Confluent pros

"The most valuable feature of Fivetran is that it only synchronizes what needs to be synchronized."

"Making the decision to implement Fivetran was supported by the fact that they have better connectors than other competitors."

"The simplicity of the solution is its valuable feature."

"Its arrays are powerful enough to handle migrations even when the replication is happening in the background, without causing any trouble with the ongoing traffic."

"Fivetran is remarkably easy to use; I haven't encountered any other data integration tool that is as user-friendly."

"The general data ingestion is valuable. It's used for a lot of data. It provides about 90% of the data we use in our data warehouse without needing data engineering."

"Fivetran offers native connectivity with Sybase"

"It is easy for users to get accustomed to the tool due to its gentle learning curve and clear error transparency."

More Fivetran pros

Cons

"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."

"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 product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."

"Confluent's price needs improvement."

"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."

"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."

"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."

"It could have more integration with different platforms."

More Confluent cons

"The documentation can be laid out better to make it easier to find things, and I really wish there was built-in support for changing passwords. Some features don't work as advertised for the platform/repository database, and HVR is not always the fastest at getting results."

"The documentation is decent, but it's hard to find information online about Fivetran. For example, if you try to search for an error code, you won't find much information about it in forums."

"The biggest area for improvement is in customization, particularly in how Fivetran socializes its tools."

"We use a separate tool for "reverse ETL", which is the opposite of what Fivetran does; it pushes data from your data warehouse back out to business applications. If Fivetran pulls data from those same applications, they should also enable users to push it back. I would love to do both ETL and reverse ETL in the same tool."

"An in-line data quality checking capability is missing"

"It should have a few more monitoring functionalities."

"This solution needs to improve its real-time data and transformation availability."

"Some of the pain points we're looking at are trying to integrate some of the items in the Microsoft stack, so SharePoint and Excel, and then some of the newer Azure services."

More Fivetran cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."

"Confluent is an expensive solution."

"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."

"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."

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

"I would say they're a little bit on the expensive side, and their contract process is not particularly good, but there is a lot of potential flexibility."

"In the first year, we were given a very good discount. It was approximately 20,000 Euros per year. In the third year, we purchased credit for two years and the price was 33,000 Euros per year."

"Fivetran is very expensive, and its database-driven pricing model is outdated."

"When you have a lot of workflows and complex use cases, pricing goes down as you use it more."

"I've heard that the license for HVR is a bit costly compared to its competitors, but since it's reliable and efficient, I think the customer shouldn't be bothered about the cost."

"I don't have the exact information, but I know it is high, and it is on a yearly basis. There is no additional cost for what we're doing. We're always open to doing things cheaper, so we might potentially implement a different solution."

"The pricing model is okay and mid to large companies will not have an issue with it."

"The product is reasonably expensive"

More Fivetran pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Integration solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Educational Organization

27%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?

They charge a lot for scaling, which makes it expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Confluent?

I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team. The lack of easy access to the Confluent support team is also a...

See all answers

What's the deal with the HVR software acquisition?

As a user of HVR Software I followed this deal closely. Fivetran is apparently trying to establish more in its sector and by buying an already established data replication software, they become som...

See all answers

Does HVR Software provide reliable insights?

I honestly can't think of another data replication software that can give you better statistics and insight than HVR Software. There's the feature for topology and statistics and both of them can ...

See all answers

How much traffic can HVR Software handle?

As someone who works at a company where a high volume of information is replicated and has tried several data replication softwares, I can tell you that you're looking at the right one. HVR Softwar...

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon Kinesis vs Confluent

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon MSK vs Confluent

Compared 11% of the time

Databricks vs Confluent

Compared 9% of the time

AWS Glue vs Confluent

Compared 4% of the time

Palantir Foundry vs Confluent

Compared 4% of the time

More Confluent Competitors

AWS Database Migration Service vs Fivetran

Compared 16% of the time

Oracle GoldenGate vs Fivetran

Compared 14% of the time

Qlik Replicate vs Fivetran

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Fivetran

Compared 7% of the time

StreamSets vs Fivetran

Compared 4% of the time

More Fivetran Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Confluent

March 2025

Download Confluent product report

Buyer's Guide

Fivetran

March 2025

Download Fivetran product report

Overview

Confluent is an enterprise-ready, full-scale streaming platform that enhances Apache Kafka.

Confluent has integrated cutting-edge features that are designed to enhance these tasks:

Speed up application development and connectivity
Enable transformations through stream processing
Streamline business operations at scale
Adhere to strict architectural standards

Confluent is a more complete distribution of Kafka in that it enhances the integration possibilities of Kafka by introducing tools for managing and optimizing Kafka clusters while providing methods for making sure the streams are secure. Confluent supports publish-and-subscribe as well as the storing and processing of data within the streams. Kafka is easier to operate and build thanks to Confluent.

Confluent's software is available in three different varieties:

A free, open-source streaming platform that makes it simple to start using real-time data streams
An enterprise-grade version of the product with more administrative, ops, and monitoring tools
A premium cloud-based version.

Confluent Advantage Features

Confluent has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Multi-language
- Clients: C++, Python, Go, and .NET
- REST proxy: Can connect to Kafka from any connected network device
- Admin REST APIs: RESTful interface for performing administrator operations

Pre-built ecosystem
- Connectors: More than 100 supported connectors, including S3, Elastic, HDFS, JDBC
- MQTT proxy: Gain access to Kafka from MQTT gateways and devices
- Schema registry: Centralized database to guarantee data compatibility

Streaming database
- ksqlDB: Materialized views and real-time stream processing

GUI management
- Control panel: GUI for scalable Kafka management and monitoring
- Health+: Smart alerts and cloud-based control centers

DevOps automation that is flexible
- Confluent for Kubernetes: Complete API to deploy on Kubernetes
- Automated Ansible deployment on non-containerized environments

Dynamic performance
- Self-balancing clusters: Automated partition re-balancing across brokers in the cluster
- Tiered storage: Older Kafka data offloading to object storage with transparent access

Security that is enterprise-grade
- Role-based access control: Granular user/group access authorization
- Audit logs that are structured: Logs of user actions kept in dedicated Kafka topics
- Secret protection: Sensitive information is encrypted

Global resilience
- Linking clusters: A real-time, highly reliable, and consistent bridge across on-premises and cloud environments
- Multiple-region clusters: Single Kafka cluster with automated client failover distributed across multiple data centers
- Replicator: Asynchronous replication that is based on the Kafka Connect framework

Support
- Round the clock enterprise support from Kafka experts

Reviews from Real Users

Confluent stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust enterprise support and its open source option. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Ravi B., a solutions architect at a tech services company, writes of the solution, “KSQL is a valuable feature, as is the Kafka Connect framework for connecting to the various source systems where you need not write the code. We get great support from Confluent because we're using the enterprise version and whenever there's a problem, they support us with fine-tuning and finding the root cause.”

Amit S., an IT consultant, notes, “The biggest benefit is that it is open source. You have the flexibility of opting or not opting for enterprise support, even though the tool itself is open source.” He adds, “The second benefit is it's very modern and built on Java and Scala. You can extend the features very well, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to do so.”

Confluent

Fivetran, the global leader in data movement, is trusted by companies like OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer, Verizon and Spotify to centralize data from SaaS applications, databases, files, and other sources into cloud destinations, including data lakes. With high-performance pipelines, seamless interoperability, and enterprise-grade security, Fivetran empowers organizations to modernize their data infrastructure, power analytics and AI, ensure compliance, and achieve transformative business outcomes. Learn more at Fivetran.com

Fivetran

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost

Autodesk, Condé Nast, JetBlue, Morgan Stanley, OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer, Verizon, SpotifyNational Australia Bank, Saks, Cemex, Okta, Dropbox, Pitney Bowes, World Fuel Services,Lufthansa, AutoZone, ASICS, ASOS, Coupa, Databricks, Hermes, New Relic, Intercom,Canva, Honeywell, Square, DocuSign, Nandos, Oldcastle Infrastructure

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. Fivetran

March 2025

Free Report: Confluent vs. Fivetran

Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. Fivetran and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Confluent vs. Fivetran report.

See our list of best Cloud Data Integration vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Data Integration reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.