Confluent vs Fivetran comparison

Confluent and Fivetran are both solutions in the Cloud Data Integration category. Additionally, 100% of Confluent users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Fivetran users who would recommend it.

Confluent

Read 22 Confluent reviews

7,085 Views
5,383 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Fivetran

Read 25 Fivetran reviews

2,370 Views
1,642 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Confluent

Fivetran

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Confluent and Fivetran based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Data Integration solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Confluent vs. Fivetran Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. Fivetran

October 2024

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Helped 816,406 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Confluent

Average Rating

8.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (3rd)

Fivetran

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (13th), Data Replication (3rd), Cloud Data Integration (6th)

Featured Reviews

Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos

Software Architect at C&A Brasil

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.

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Erik Jones

Head of BI and Analytics at HyperScience

Solution reduces time-to-value; high ROI

Fivetran has room for improvement in data pipeline observability. The Fivetran logs are fairly basic, compared to, for example, the insight Fivetran gives into helping users understanding the performance of data pipelines. So I think their observability into the pipeline itself could be improved. In addition, Fivetran is in the very early stages of allowing other companies to access its metadata API, but that's something that could use improvement, and I know that they're working on right now. We use a separate tool for "reverse ETL", which is the opposite of what Fivetran does; it pushes data from your data warehouse back out to business applications. If Fivetran pulls data from those same applications, they should also enable users to push it back. I would love to do both ETL and reverse ETL in the same tool. It would be nice if Fivetran offered both their regular offering plus the reverse ETL option as well.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The documentation process is fast with the tool."

"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."

"The monitoring module is impressive."

"The most valuable feature that we are using is the data replication between the data centers allowing us to configure a disaster recovery or software. However, is it's not mandatory to use and because most of the features that we use are from Apache Kafka, such as end-to-end encryption. Internally, we can develop our own kind of product or service from Apache Kafka."

"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."

"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."

"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."

"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."

More Confluent pros

"The most important feature of the solution is its ability to build data pipelines in less time."

"Its arrays are powerful enough to handle migrations even when the replication is happening in the background, without causing any trouble with the ongoing traffic."

"The simplicity of the solution is its valuable feature."

"The product has some seamless connectors, which are readily available."

"The portal is very intuitive and easy to use."

"The simplicity and scalability are the strongest features of Fivetran."

"Fivetran is remarkably easy to use; I haven't encountered any other data integration tool that is as user-friendly."

"It is not like a traditional ETL, but it gives quite a lot of flexibility."

More Fivetran pros

Cons

"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."

"Confluent's price needs improvement."

"It would help if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."

"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."

"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Confluent cons

"The documentation is decent, but it's hard to find information online about Fivetran. For example, if you try to search for an error code, you won't find much information about it in forums."

"The customization could improve because Fivetran gives more thought to people who don't want to manage analytics workflows rather than engineers who want to be able to customize pipelines more thoroughly."

"The documentation can be laid out better to make it easier to find things, and I really wish there was built-in support for changing passwords. Some features don't work as advertised for the platform/repository database, and HVR is not always the fastest at getting results."

"An in-line data quality checking capability is missing"

"Some of the pain points we're looking at are trying to integrate some of the items in the Microsoft stack, so SharePoint and Excel, and then some of the newer Azure services."

"We experience cost issues because Fivetran is charged on a usage basis. When you reach a certain level, the tool should focus on reducing the costs. The solution is expensive when you are moving gigabytes and petabytes of data. It should also focus more on REST APIs and webhooks."

"The interface needs to be more user-friendly."

"I would like for them to incorporate additional transformations. A valuable aspect of the product is that it does inflight transformations and that could be expanded."

More Fivetran cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is highly priced."

"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."

"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 has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."

"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."

"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."

"It comes with a high cost."

More Confluent pricing and cost advice

"I would say they're a little bit on the expensive side, and their contract process is not particularly good, but there is a lot of potential flexibility."

"I've heard that the license for HVR is a bit costly compared to its competitors, but since it's reliable and efficient, I think the customer shouldn't be bothered about the cost."

"The licensing costs are extremely high for the usage of somebody who has one GB or two GB of usage per day for real-time traffic. There are many other players in the market which are similarly priced or competitively priced. On average per month, it used to come around 12,000-15,000 USD, which is very high."

"The product is reasonably expensive"

"I can't give exact amounts because that's based on usage, but it's more expensive than some of its competitors."

"Fivetran is very expensive, and its database-driven pricing model is outdated."

"I rate the pricing a six out of ten."

"I don't have the exact information, but I know it is high, and it is on a yearly basis. There is no additional cost for what we're doing. We're always open to doing things cheaper, so we might potentially implement a different solution."

More Fivetran pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Educational Organization

28%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

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...

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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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What's the deal with the HVR software acquisition?

As a user of HVR Software I followed this deal closely. Fivetran is apparently trying to establish more in its sector and by buying an already established data replication software, they become som...

See all answers

Does HVR Software provide reliable insights?

I honestly can't think of another data replication software that can give you better statistics and insight than HVR Software. There's the feature for topology and statistics and both of them can ...

See all answers

How much traffic can HVR Software handle?

As someone who works at a company where a high volume of information is replicated and has tried several data replication softwares, I can tell you that you're looking at the right one. HVR Softwar...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Confluent

November 2024

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Buyer's Guide

Fivetran

November 2024

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Confluent

Fivetran

Overview

Confluent is an enterprise-ready, full-scale streaming platform that enhances Apache Kafka.

Confluent has integrated cutting-edge features that are designed to enhance these tasks:

Speed up application development and connectivity
Enable transformations through stream processing
Streamline business operations at scale
Adhere to strict architectural standards

Confluent is a more complete distribution of Kafka in that it enhances the integration possibilities of Kafka by introducing tools for managing and optimizing Kafka clusters while providing methods for making sure the streams are secure. Confluent supports publish-and-subscribe as well as the storing and processing of data within the streams. Kafka is easier to operate and build thanks to Confluent.

Confluent's software is available in three different varieties:

A free, open-source streaming platform that makes it simple to start using real-time data streams
An enterprise-grade version of the product with more administrative, ops, and monitoring tools
A premium cloud-based version.

Confluent Advantage Features

Confluent has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Multi-language
- Clients: C++, Python, Go, and .NET
- REST proxy: Can connect to Kafka from any connected network device
- Admin REST APIs: RESTful interface for performing administrator operations

Pre-built ecosystem
- Connectors: More than 100 supported connectors, including S3, Elastic, HDFS, JDBC
- MQTT proxy: Gain access to Kafka from MQTT gateways and devices
- Schema registry: Centralized database to guarantee data compatibility

Streaming database
- ksqlDB: Materialized views and real-time stream processing

GUI management
- Control panel: GUI for scalable Kafka management and monitoring
- Health+: Smart alerts and cloud-based control centers

DevOps automation that is flexible
- Confluent for Kubernetes: Complete API to deploy on Kubernetes
- Automated Ansible deployment on non-containerized environments

Dynamic performance
- Self-balancing clusters: Automated partition re-balancing across brokers in the cluster
- Tiered storage: Older Kafka data offloading to object storage with transparent access

Security that is enterprise-grade
- Role-based access control: Granular user/group access authorization
- Audit logs that are structured: Logs of user actions kept in dedicated Kafka topics
- Secret protection: Sensitive information is encrypted

Global resilience
- Linking clusters: A real-time, highly reliable, and consistent bridge across on-premises and cloud environments
- Multiple-region clusters: Single Kafka cluster with automated client failover distributed across multiple data centers
- Replicator: Asynchronous replication that is based on the Kafka Connect framework

Support
- Round the clock enterprise support from Kafka experts

Reviews from Real Users

Confluent stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust enterprise support and its open source option. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Ravi B., a solutions architect at a tech services company, writes of the solution, “KSQL is a valuable feature, as is the Kafka Connect framework for connecting to the various source systems where you need not write the code. We get great support from Confluent because we're using the enterprise version and whenever there's a problem, they support us with fine-tuning and finding the root cause.”

Amit S., an IT consultant, notes, “The biggest benefit is that it is open source. You have the flexibility of opting or not opting for enterprise support, even though the tool itself is open source.” He adds, “The second benefit is it's very modern and built on Java and Scala. You can extend the features very well, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to do so.”

Fivetran is a data integration and migration solution that centralizes data from various sources into a data warehouse (such as Snowflake or BigQuery) for analytics. Its most valuable features include replication and managed pipelines, integration with DBT for data transformation, and many source connections.

Fivetran is easy to use, with fast data migration and an intuitive portal for easy setup and troubleshooting. It has helped organizations integrate and manage data, saving time and resources.

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost

DocuSign, Oldcastle Infrastructure, Crossmedia, Talkdesk, Chubbies, Brandwatch

Buyer's Guide

Confluent vs. Fivetran

October 2024

Free Report: Confluent vs. Fivetran

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