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AWS Glue vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

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

AWS Glue
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (1st)
Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

Saurabh Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables seamless integration and data preparation with robust transformation capabilities
AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models. It offers transformation options on canvas or through ETL pipelines, notebooks, and code. Additionally, it supports data preparation, cleaning, and filtering seamlessly. AWS Glue also enhances job scheduling and orchestration capabilities, integrating with AWS Glue Studio for comprehensive data workflow management.
Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming
Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance. It helps us understand the various requirements of multiple customers and validates the information for different versions. We can automate the tasks using Confluent Kafka. Thus, it guarantees us the data quality and maintains the integrity of message contracts.

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 AWS Glue is its real-time data backup feature. Last week, there was a production push, and what used to take almost ten days to send out around fifty-six thousand emails now takes only two hours."
"The facility to integrate with S3 and the possibility to use Jupyter Notebook inside the pipeline are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is its ease of use and good documentation. Additionally, we can do all the transformations that we need."
"For ETL, I feel the performance is excellent."
"AWS Glue's best features are scalability and cloud-based features."
"The product has a valuable feature for data catalog."
"One aspect that I would like to highlight is the Glue Crawler, which we utilize when working with large datasets to ensure the schema updates seamlessly without requiring end-team knowledge."
"The solution is serverless so it allows us to transform data while optimizing the cost and performance of Spark jobs."
"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."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
 

Cons

"The solution should offer features for streaming data in addition to batching data."
"AWS Glue is more costly compared to other tools like Airflow."
"The product is expensive for data streaming. This area needs improvement."
"One area that could be improved is the ETL view. The drag-and-drop interface is not as user-friendly as some other ETL tools."
"It is quite clunky and code-heavy, which is my biggest problem."
"The solution’s stability could be improved."
"The monitoring is not that good."
"The product has only a few built-in transformations."
"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."
"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."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"The Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the tool an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is expensive."
"AWS Glue follows a pay-as-you-go model, wherein the cost of the data you use will be counted as a monthly bill."
"I rate pricing an eight out of ten."
"I would rate the solution a six or seven on a scale of one to ten, with ten being very expensive. Specifically, I rate its pricing a six out of ten."
"Its price is good. We pay as we go or based on the usage, which is a good thing for us because it is simple to forecast for the tool. It is good in terms of the financial planning of the company, and it is a good way to estimate the cost. It is also simple for our clients. In my opinion, it is one of the best tools in the market for ETL processes because of the fact that you pay as you use, which separates it from other big tools such as PowerCenter, Pentaho Data Integration, and Talend."
"The solution's pricing is based on DPUs so it is a good idea to optimize use or it can get expensive."
"I rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten."
"If you are using the solution for an enterprise business, it will be expensive."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?
AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.
How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?
We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...
What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?
AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...
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 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...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Glue vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.