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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
6.4
Number of Reviews
59
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

"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent, and the other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."
"The benefit is escaping email communication. Sometimes people ignore emails or put them into spam, but with Confluence, everyone sees the same text at the same time."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"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 tools."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"The virtualization tool is useful."
"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."
"In my experience, the best features Palantir Foundry offers are its usefulness for all levels of people from analysts to product managers to software engineers."
"Previously, the team used to take more than a week to gather data for a particular entity and make it ready for downstream use cases, and that was reduced from seven days to close to 30 to 45 minutes because everything was automated using pipelines and schedules."
"In my experience, the best features Palantir Foundry offers include the ontology and the possibility to create a digital twin of your company."
"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."
"We believe that the client has improved their efficiency compared to their previous working model; they have more clarity and, above all, more control over the data."
"The best features Palantir Foundry offers are the ease of use and the availability of all the different functionalities in a single space, making it a very convenient application to use for varying different purposes such as the workflow I mentioned."
 

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 be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"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."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"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."
"The major hindrance with Palantir Foundry is that being a very closed product, the cost optimization and costing are not exposed to the end users."
"One way Palantir Foundry can be improved is by addressing issues with back-end changes. There were cases where changes made to Palantir Foundry would cause failures across all platforms."
"Palantir Foundry is very accurate, but I would have doubts about its reliability because there have been instances in my current job where we experience untimely application downtime, which has impacted the business significantly, so I think reliability needs improvement."
"There are still a lot of changes required in Palantir Foundry to make it more usable or easy to use."
"Some error messages can be very cryptic."
"If you want to create new models on specific data sets, computing that is quite costly."
"I think much of the work within Palantir Foundry is still manual, so I might want to write certain automations or develop conversational interfaces rapidly."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Palantir Foundry was challenging for us."
 

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."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
"It comes with a high cost."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"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."
"Palantir Foundry is an expensive solution."
"Palantir Foundry has different pricing models that can be negotiated."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
"It's expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
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 Enterprise48
 

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
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