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Azure Stream Analytics vs Confluent comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 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

Azure Stream Analytics
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
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 Azure Stream Analytics is 12.4%, down from 13.7% 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

Sudhendra Umarji - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to set up and user-friendly, but could be priced better
I haven't come across missing items. It does what I need it to do. The pricing is a little bit high. The UI should be a little bit better from a usability perspective. The endpoint, if you are outsourcing to a third party, should have easier APIs. I'd like to have more destination sources available to us.
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

"I like the way the UI looks, and the real-time analytics service is aligned to this. That can be helpful if I have to use this on a production service."
"It's a product that can scale."
"The life cycle, report management and crash management features are great."
"It's scalable as a cloud product."
"The integrations for this solution are easy to use and there is flexibility in integrating the tool with Azure Stream Analytics."
"The most valuable features are the IoT hub and the Blob storage."
"I like all the connected ecosystems of Microsoft, it is really good with other BI tools that are easy to connect."
"It provides the capability to streamline multiple output components."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"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."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
 

Cons

"The only challenge was that the streaming analytics area in Azure Stream Analytics could not meet our company's expectations, making it a component where improvements are required."
"The solution doesn't handle large data packets very efficiently, which could be improved upon."
"The solution offers a free trial, however, it is too short."
"Easier scalability and more detailed job monitoring features would be helpful."
"The solution could be improved by providing better graphics and including support for UI and UX testing."
"Its features for event imports and architecture could be enhanced."
"It is not complex, but it requires some development skills. When the data is sent from Azure Stream Analytics to Power BI, I don't have the access to modify the data. I can't customize or edit the data or do some queries. All queries need to be done in the Azure Stream Analytics."
"We would like to have centralized platform altogether since we have different kind of options for data ingestion. Sometimes it gets difficult to manage different platforms."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"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 could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"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 would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing for this product is payable on a 'pay as you go' basis. This means that the cost is only based on data volume, and the frequency that the solution is used."
"The current price is substantial."
"The cost of this solution is less than competitors such as Amazon or Google Cloud."
"There are different tiers based on retention policies. There are four tiers. The pricing varies based on steaming units and tiers. The standard pricing is $10/hour."
"Azure Stream Analytics is a little bit expensive."
"When scaling up, the pricing for Azure Stream Analytics can get relatively high. Considering its capabilities compared to other solutions, I would rate it a seven out of ten for cost. However, we've found ways to optimize costs using tools like Databricks for specific tasks."
"I rate the price of Azure Stream Analytics a four out of five."
"We pay approximately $500,000 a year. It's approximately $10,000 a year per license."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Stream Analytics?
Stream Analytics is cheaper, especially for small-scale requirements or telemetry needs. However, for enterprise-level data handling, structured streaming with Databricks might be more cost-effecti...
What needs improvement with Azure Stream Analytics?
More flexibility in terms of writing queries and accommodating additional facilities would be beneficial. The complexity of handling messages that need decoding and contain different characters sho...
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...
 

Also Known As

ASA
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rockwell Automation, Milliman, Honeywell Building Solutions, Arcoflex Automation Solutions, Real Madrid C.F., Aerocrine, Ziosk, Tacoma Public Schools, P97 Networks
ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Stream Analytics vs. Confluent and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.