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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 (9th)
Palantir Foundry
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (5th), IT Operations Analytics (5th), 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

"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 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."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"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."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent."
"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."
"Palantir Foundry's AI capabilities, governance, and security are top tier as it is a fully locked environment and is best for government organizations where data security is a major consideration."
"The interface is really user-friendly."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization by centralizing the way we build applications and standardizing business metric reporting, creating more alignment across my team and the organization, greater productivity between teams, and quicker cycle times into production."
"Combining data sources and hosting models in Palantir Foundry has helped my work because it is convenient to work in one environment rather than moving from one application to another, as Palantir Foundry allows for that one-stop shop where I can accomplish much of the work."
"Palantir Foundry has dramatically helped us in terms of project costing because earlier we had our own React developers team from offshore, and now with the AIP capabilities launched on the platform, we have completely avoided the need for a dedicated team, which has been very helpful in terms of cost management and reducing team size."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization through multiple use cases, such as warranty data refinement, where previously we struggled with identifying the number of claims related to specific products."
"Based on my huge experience with Palantir Foundry, I find that starting from the data connection to the end user application, there is a tool for everyone."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization by providing good support from Palantir teams, facilitating the development of many new solutions, building our UI and web applications, and significantly enhancing our productivity."
 

Cons

"The product should integrate tools for incorporating diagrams like Lucidchart. It also needs to improve its formatting features. We also faced issues while granting permissions."
"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."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"The frontend capabilities of Palantir Foundry could be improved."
"The startup pricing is high, causing concern despite being cost-effective in terms of total cost of ownership."
"As a developer, I find the limited documentation and less resource availability restrictive compared to other options such as AWS."
"They do not have a data center in Europe, and we have lots of personally identifiable information in our dataset that needs to be hosted by a third-party data center like Amazon or Microsoft Azure."
"The workflow could be improved. Although it works rather seamlessly, the workflow is too complicated sometimes."
"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."
"If it was my choice, I wouldn't sign the contract with Palantir in the first place. I would probably stick to standard Databricks."
"The solution could use more online documentation for new users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
"Palantir Foundry has different pricing models that can be negotiated."
"It's expensive."
"Palantir Foundry is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
University
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 Enterprise44
 

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?
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 n...
What is your primary use case for Palantir Foundry?
I use Palantir Foundry for my primary use case, which involves building and maintaining end-to-end pipelines and operational data products at UHG for our healthcare analytics team. I work on data i...
What advice do you have for others considering Palantir Foundry?
My advice would be to approach Palantir Foundry as an enterprise operational platform, not just a traditional data tool. The platform delivers the most value when organizations fully leverage its g...
 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Informatica, Palantir and others in Cloud Data Integration. Updated: June 2026.
899,125 professionals have used our research since 2012.