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Confluent vs Palantir Foundry comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (7th)
Palantir Foundry
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (3rd), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Supply Chain Analytics (1st), Cloud Data Integration (4th), Data Migration Appliances (2nd), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (1st), Data and Analytics Service Providers (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

PavanManepalli - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP - Sr Middleware Messaging Integration Engineer at Wells Fargo
Has supported streaming use cases across data centers and simplifies fraud analytics with SQL-based processing
I recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools. They need to improve in that direction by not only reducing costs but also providing better solutions for the problems customers face to avoid frustrations, whether through future enhancement requests or ensuring product stability. The cost should be worked on, and they should provide better solutions for customers. Solutions should focus on hierarchical topics; if a customer has different types of data and sources, they should be able to send them to the same place for analytics. Currently, Confluent requires everything to send to the same topic, which becomes very large and makes running analytics difficult. The hierarchy of topics should be improved. This part is available in MQ and other products such as Solace, but it is missing in Confluent, leading many in capital markets and trading to switch to Solace. In terms of stability, it is not the stability itself that needs improvement but rather the delivery semantics. Other products offer exactly-once delivery out of the box, whereas Confluent states it will offer this but lacks the knobs or levers for tuning configurations effectively. Confluent has hundreds of configurations that application teams must understand, which creates a gap. Users are often unaware of what values to set for better performance or to achieve exactly-once semantics, making it difficult to navigate through them. Delivery semantics also need to be worked on.
reviewer2846265 - PeerSpot reviewer
PALANTIR DATA ENGINEER at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Unified healthcare pipelines have improved data trust and accelerated operational decisions
One challenge regarding how Palantir Foundry can be improved is the learning curve. Foundry has a very broad ecosystem with Ontology, Pipeline Builder, Code Repositories, and AI integrations. For new engineers or business users onboarding, it can take time, especially if they are coming from more traditional data platforms. Better documentation, simplified onboarding paths, and more beginner-friendly examples would help accelerate adoption. Another area is debugging complexity. While lineage and monitoring are strong features, troubleshooting deeply interconnected pipelines can still become difficult in a large enterprise environment. Sometimes error logs and pipeline failure messages could be more descriptive or developer-friendly, especially for distributed PySpark jobs. Another pain point is customization limitations in certain UI-driven components. While low-code tools are great for rapid development, highly customized workflows sometimes still require engineering workarounds or deeper technical implementation. The platform is extremely capable, but improvements around usability, debugging experience, DevOps flexibility, and ecosystem openness would make it even more effective for enterprise engineering teams.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"I would rate the scalability of the solution at eight out of ten. We have 20 people who use Confluent in our organization now, and we hope to increase usage in the future."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."
"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."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"The strength of Palantir Foundry is that there are no limitations, it is well organized, and the data is very secure."
"Palantir Foundry has reduced a very good amount of time to implement a data pipeline and process the data within four hours."
"From my experience, one of the best features Palantir Foundry offers is that you have everything in one ecosystem."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization by increasing the operational throughput of the yard, which focuses on building new ships or repairing existing ones."
"Palantir Foundry has proven to be a great tool in terms of scalability for me, especially compared to Power BI, which felt inadequate, as its scalability depends on the Slate application and I am only limited by my imagination."
"The virtualization tool is useful."
"Both time and money were saved since a project that would usually take six months was completed in two to three months."
"The data lineage is great."
 

Cons

"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."
"Confluent has fallen behind in being the tool of the industry. It's taking second place to things such as Word and SharePoint and other office tools that are more dynamic and flexible than Confluent."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"The beginner who doesn't know how to work on HTML will struggle as when you create spaces in the Confluent, if you want to have some meeting notes or anything else, you need to know HTML and which HTML tags to include."
"I choose eight out of ten because the software still needs a lot of updates to make it stable, and today, it is not stable."
"As a developer, I find the limited documentation and less resource availability restrictive compared to other options such as AWS."
"Always having to work with a Palantir representative creates severe bottlenecks and increases costs, making it desirable for me as the end user to perform tasks without constant requests for support."
"Palantir Foundry could be improved by addressing the need for some coding in the Workshop since we cannot expect 100% no-code functionality, especially when dealing with dynamic user input, which requires writing functions in the Code Repository."
"Handling initial onboarding and training for Palantir Foundry has been challenging. We face difficulties in accessing resources, which prompts us to arrange training sessions with Palantir Foundry representatives."
"When we were using ETL with Palantir Foundry, we found we had less freedom compared to Cloudera, where we had more liberty in using various configuration parameters of Spark, allowing us to tune our jobs accordingly."
"I believe that the AI or agent needs improvement because sometimes we face difficulties when looking for solutions, and when we ask the agent, AIP, it does not understand our queries and occasionally provides wrong solutions."
"Palantir Foundry has a steep learning curve and onboarding."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
"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 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."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Palantir Foundry has different pricing models that can be negotiated."
"It's expensive."
"Palantir Foundry is an expensive solution."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise50
 

Questions from the Community

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 recommend that Confluent should improve its solution to keep up with competitors in the market, such as Solace and other upcoming tools such as NATS. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about ...
What is your primary use case for Confluent?
The main use cases for Confluent are log aggregation and streaming. I'm familiar with Confluent stream processing with KSQL. KSQL helps in terms of data analytics strategies because if we are the d...
What needs improvement with Palantir Foundry?
The Workshop application could be improved because it is not very customizable, but it is still very strong. We also have the React OSK apps, but it does not allow the inbuilt applications such as ...
What is your primary use case for Palantir Foundry?
My main use case for Palantir Foundry is to solve business problems, such as in healthcare. I also worked on a project for a law firm where thousands of PDFs were coming in, and we needed to check ...
What advice do you have for others considering Palantir Foundry?
I believe they should get started by completing all the free certificates, then they could apply to the paid certificates to get a master of Palantir Foundry, solve some real use cases, do examples...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Merck KGaA, Airbus, Ferrari,United States Intelligence Community, United States Department of Defense
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