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Confluent vs Palantir Foundry comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (5th)
Palantir Foundry
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (12th), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Supply Chain Analytics (1st), Cloud Data Integration (11th), Data Migration Appliances (3rd), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (1st), Data and Analytics Service Providers (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
SR
Architect at L&T Technology Services
Finds security and customization features impressive, although cost concerns persist
My experience with Palantir Foundry and Azure has been good. Palantir Foundry is costly, but Azure is open, which allows for easier experimentation. Being a closed product, Palantir Foundry is difficult to practice offline unless we have an enterprise edition. However, it is very secure compared to other platforms. Palantir Foundry's best features include security, built-in features, low-code, no-code platform, and ease of use. The collaborative workspaces within Palantir Foundry contribute to team efficiency and project outcomes through seamless operation. The ease of customization is particularly notable. I have worked with the data lineage feature in Palantir Foundry, which comes by default. We simply need to tick the checkbox and make necessary configuration changes within the system itself. We do not need to procure another lineage platform as Palantir Foundry has its own built-in features for data lineage, data governance, and data security. The lineage feature helps enhance our data management practices by allowing us to understand the origin of data, track all activities happening on the data, identify users and consumers, and monitor how it flows across the system. This makes it easier to generate reports based on the lineage database. The predictive analytics capability within Palantir Foundry impacts financial forecasting strategies through its AIP functionality, which includes numerous pre-built models, LLMs, and data science application libraries. Using the AIP library within Palantir Foundry helps us develop quick resolutions for predictive models and analytics.

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."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 tools."
"Great features available in one tool."
"I rate Palantir Foundry a ten out of ten."
"The AI engine that comes with Palantir Foundry is quite interesting."
"The predictive analytics capability within Palantir Foundry impacts financial forecasting strategies through its AIP functionality, which includes numerous pre-built models, LLMs, and data science application libraries."
"Palantir Foundry is a robust platform that has really strong plugin connectors and provides features for real-time integration."
"The interface is really user-friendly."
"I like the data onboarding to Palantir Foundry and ETL creation."
"The virtualization tool is useful."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"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."
"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."
"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."
"The workflow could be improved."
"Compared to other hyperscalers, Palantir Foundry is complex and not so user-intuitive."
"The startup pricing is high, causing concern despite being cost-effective in terms of total cost of ownership."
"Some error messages can be very cryptic."
"The frontend capabilities of Palantir Foundry could be improved."
"The solution's visualization and analysis could be improved."
"The solution could use more online documentation for new users."
"It requires a lot of manual work and is very time-consuming to get to a functional point."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a high cost."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"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."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Palantir Foundry is an expensive solution."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
"Palantir Foundry has different pricing models that can be negotiated."
"It's expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise8
 

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...
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 needs improvement with Palantir Foundry?
Apart from the pricing and offline availability issues, improvements are needed in Palantir Foundry's costing factor. Cost-wise, it is not open for everybody, and they are not exposing anything out...
What is your primary use case for Palantir Foundry?
One of the leading European manufacturing plants uses Palantir Foundry for manufacturing interior parts of various car brands such as Honda, Hyundai, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW. This involves hig...
What advice do you have for others considering Palantir Foundry?
Palantir Foundry is an excellent product for data engineering. On a scale of one to 10, I would rate Palantir Foundry a 9.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Merck KGaA, Airbus, Ferrari,United States Intelligence Community, United States Department of Defense
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. Palantir Foundry and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.