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Confluent vs IBM Streams 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:
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Confluent's customer service is praised for responsiveness and efficiency, though some users desire improved guidance and best practices.
Sentiment score
7.8
IBM Streams customer support is praised for excellent tech support, proactive service, and a strong professional forum.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Confluent efficiently scales across diverse industries, handling high data volumes, but faces challenges in multi-cloud and scaling down.
Sentiment score
9.0
IBM Streams is scalable and efficient for large data, supporting government and finance needs with low latency and efficient clustering.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Confluent is generally stable with few bugs, but occasional outages occur, especially during Azure integration and maintenance.
Sentiment score
5.8
IBM Streams is stable, enterprise-class software with reliable operators, though IDE crashes and external interface issues can occur.
 

Room For Improvement

Confluent requires enhanced plugins, usability, integration, security, documentation, cost management, search, governance, and tool expansion for improved user experience.
IBM Streams needs enhancements in debugging, Python support, machine learning tools, dynamic scaling, and connector availability to reduce custom solutions.
 

Setup Cost

Confluent's pricing is seen as high and inflexible, with larger organizations favoring open-source alternatives for cost efficiency.
 

Valuable Features

Confluent offers scalability, easy navigation, integrations, real-time streaming, customization, and user-friendly management, with strong support and documentation.
IBM Streams offers scalable, real-time analytics with Java, diverse connectors, and toolkits, benefiting healthcare and time series data processing.
 

Categories and Ranking

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
IBM Streams
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
18th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Confluent is 9.1%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Streams is 0.8%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Ahmed_Emad - PeerSpot reviewer
A solution for data pipelines but has connector limitations
We have used Kafka for seven years. IBM streams gives you many OOTB features that can boost the time-to-market, especially when it comes to reporting and monitoring for example. Confluent is recognized as one of the leaders in this space and the main reason for this is related to the complete vision of the platform also the large number of connectors. This gives the edge and competitive advatnage.
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Streaming Analytics solutions are best for your needs.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
20%
Healthcare Company
5%
Retailer
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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?
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Streams?
The solution’s licenses pricing is different from one region to another region. I rate the solution’s pricing a seven out of ten.
What needs improvement with IBM Streams?
the limited number of connectors. This shall be overcome with work-arounds or eventually buying additional connectors to complete the solution.
What is your primary use case for IBM Streams?
We use the solution for data pipeline by modernizing the traditional ETL jobs done through advanced streaming. Another use case is building the g2g streaming platform, which facilitates data exchan...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
IBM InfoSphere Streams
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Globo TV, All England Lawn Tennis Club, CenterPoint Energy, Consolidated Communications Holdings, Darwin Ecosystem, Emory University Hospital, ICICI Securities, Irish Centre for Fetal and Neonatal Translational Research (INFANT), Living Roads, Mobileum, Optibus, Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP), University of Alberta, University of Montana, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Wimbledon 2015
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. IBM Streams and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.