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Amazon MSK vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 26, 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

Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Confluent
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 8.9%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Confluent is 8.8%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

FNU AKSHANSH - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic
We don't have many use cases involving ingesting large amounts of data and scaling up and down. We have a clear understanding of our data volume, which remains relatively constant throughout the week. While we're aware of other features Amazon MSK offers, we feel confident in our current setup. If our requirements change significantly in the future, we'll reassess our needs and consider adopting Amazon MSK.
Yantao Zhao - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."
"It offers good stability."
"The solution's technical support was helpful."
"Amazon MSK's separation of concerns and ease of creating and deploying new features are highly valuable. It just requires to assign them to the topic, and then anyone who needs to consume these messages can do so directly from Amazon MSK. This separation of concerns makes it very convenient, especially for new feature development, as developers can easily access the messages they need without having to deal with complex server communications or protocol setups."
"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."
"It is a stable product."
"Amazon MSK has good integration because our team has been undergoing significant changes. Coupling it with MSK within AWS is helpful. We don't have to set up additionals or monitor external environments. This"
"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
 

Cons

"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It does not autoscale. Because if you do keep it manually when you add a note to the cluster and then you register it, then it is scalable, but the fact that you have to go and do it, I think, makes it, again, a bit of some operational overhead when managing the cluster."
"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."
"It should be more flexible, integration-wise."
"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."
"In my opinion, there are areas in Amazon MSK that could be improved, particularly in terms of configuration. Initially setting it up and getting it connected was quite challenging. The naming conventions for policies were updated by AWS, and some were undocumented, leading to confusion with outdated materials. It took us weeks of trial and error before discovering new methods through hidden tutorials and official documentation."
"The product's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET."
"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"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's price needs improvement."
"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."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."
"When you create a complete enterprise-driven architecture that is deployable on an enterprise scale, I would say that the prices of Amazon MSK and Confluent Platform become comparable."
"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."
"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."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MSK?
Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.
What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?
From AWS, I would consider more MSK schema validation is needed. It is easy to integrate if you have an application, but on-topic integration is more complex. You can do it with EvenBridge very eas...
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
I have used Confluent Cloud and Amazon MSK in my company. We are not using it for analytics and it is more for CDC processes, so we change the capture processes. It is used to extract data from a d...
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?
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 maintenanc...
What needs improvement with Confluent?
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 c...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.