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Aiven Platform vs Confluent 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

Aiven Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
16th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
6
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 July 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Aiven Platform is 2.4%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 6.6%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Confluent6.6%
Aiven Platform2.4%
Other91.0%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Yatin Parmar - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees
Managed data services have streamlined our workflows and accelerated feature delivery
Aiven Platform's best features include fully managed everything that is automated, which I value the most. High availability, monitoring, and very little operational overhead are standout capabilities, and I also appreciate how easy it is to scale resources.Aiven Platform's automation has specifically helped my team day-to-day, as those managed capabilities save my DevOps team a significant amount of time every month by eliminating the need to plan maintenance. I could identify the performance bottleneck, and my development cycle became much more efficient. Aiven Platform has positively impacted my organization by reducing the amount of infrastructure management, allowing my engineering team to become production-ready because they spend less time troubleshooting. It definitely increased my confidence in the production environment.
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

"What I like best about the tool is that the process for the services is faster compared to other methods. It's easier to use because Aiven for Apache Kafka handles the maintenance, so we have less to manage. We only use Kafka to manage its connectivity."
"Aiven Platform has positively impacted my organization by reducing the amount of infrastructure management, allowing my engineering team to become production-ready because they spend less time troubleshooting."
"The performance of Aiven Platform is quite good, as I have not seen any downtime, and it is very reliable, with backups in place, allowing me to fetch data without experiencing any high latency, even as a free tier user."
"Based on my experience with Aiven Platform, the best feature it offers is Apache Kafka, which is top-notch and one of the best services I have used."
"One of the most valuable features of Aiven Platform is that it handles the upgrades for us seamlessly, saving us time that would be spent on routine upgrades."
"Aiven Platform delivers highly accurate and reliable outputs with consistent performance, and its managed services, monitoring, and high availability features help to ensure data integrity and minimize downtime, highlighting the accuracy and reliability of the output."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent, and 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."
 

Cons

"Aiven Platform can be improved in terms of having better cost visibility and more detailed budgeting and forecasting features, as well as some advanced configuration options."
"I would really like to see Aiven Platform add a user interface for database backups, as this would eliminate the need for a third-party solution."
"Regarding needed improvements, I find the support and documentation a bit lacking in detail, and sometimes it takes long to get replies when I need support, which can be a challenge."
"One challenge we face is when we want to update the version, for example, from 3.6 to 3.7. It will spawn new nodes, and then there's rebalancing and syncing from other brokers. There's high CPU usage during this process, so the solution can't be used for a while, causing some downtime in our services. To tackle this challenge, we schedule maintenance updates during low-traffic periods when there's less risk and fewer users use the services."
"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."
"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 solution could have an extra plugin or upgrading feature. In addition, it could have more integration with different platforms and be more compatible."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"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."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"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 has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"It comes with a high cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Aiven for Apache Kafka?
Aiven Platform could be improved by offering more detailed monitoring and analytics, additional customization plan options, enhanced cost operation insights, and more comprehensive data for advance...
What is your primary use case for Aiven for Apache Kafka?
My main use case for Aiven Platform is managing our databases and data services, which is reliable and has good performance for less operational overhead. When I say I use it for managing databases...
What advice do you have for others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka?
My advice for others looking into using Aiven Platform is that if they are managing a Postgres database, they need to switch to Aiven Platform. It is truly worth it for the automatic management, au...
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Aiven Platform vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
903,118 professionals have used our research since 2012.