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Confluent vs Databricks 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

Confluent
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Databricks
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (7th), Data Science Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Confluent is 8.5%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 14.6%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

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.
ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"We like that this solution can handle a wide variety and velocity of data engineering, either in batch mode or real-time."
"Imageflow is a visual tool that helps make it easier for business people to understand complex workflows."
"Databricks' Lakehouse architecture has been most useful for us. The data governance has been absolutely efficient in between other kinds of solutions."
"Databricks is a scalable solution. It is the largest advantage of the solution."
"The Delta Lake data type has been the most useful part of this solution. Delta Lake is an opensource data type and it was implemented and invented by Databricks."
"Databricks' most valuable feature is the data transformation through PySpark."
"Ability to work collaboratively without having to worry about the infrastructure."
 

Cons

"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"The pricing of Databricks could be cheaper."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
"In the future, I would like to see Data Lake support. That is something that I'm looking forward to."
"I believe that this product could be improved by becoming more user-friendly."
"The product should incorporate more learning aspects. It needs to have a free trial version that the team can practice."
"Support for Microsoft technology and the compatibility with the .NET framework is somewhat missing."
"One area of improvement is the Databricks File System (DBFS), where command-line challenges arise when accessing files. Standardization of file paths on the system could help, as engineers sometimes struggle."
"The initial setup is difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
"The licensing costs of Databricks depend on how many licenses we need, depending on which Databricks provides a lot of discounts."
"The solution is based on a licensing model."
"The price is okay. It's competitive."
"Databricks' cost could be improved."
"I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
"The pricing depends on the usage itself."
"Databricks are not costly when compared with other solutions' prices."
"We only pay for the Azure compute behind the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 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...
Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.