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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

"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."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"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."
"Some of the best features are that it's very quick to set up, very easy to have a centralized area that gives us a history of changes, and the ability to give feedback on any information placed onto the pages."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"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."
"The solution offers very good end-to-end capabilities."
"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."
"After we automated the entire workflow on Palantir Foundry, it ran really well in terms of time and correctness, and also data quality."
"With Palantir Foundry, it helps us have better benefits and better return on investment, and also accelerates the right decision in the market."
"From my experience, one of the best features Palantir Foundry offers is that you have everything in one ecosystem."
"Palantir Foundry is one of the most leading and comfortable tools to develop end-to-end data solutions."
"Both time and money were saved since a project that would usually take six months was completed in two to three months."
 

Cons

"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"It could be more user-friendly and centralized. A way to reduce redundancy would be helpful."
"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."
"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."
"It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes."
"The pricing was high for our needs. We should not have to pay for features we do not use."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"There is not a wide user base for the solution's online documentation so it is sometimes difficult to find answers."
"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."
"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."
"With Palantir Foundry, it is a part of the user tools that they provide. Their AI Assist that they use is something I have found that sometimes I get better results for when I do need help and aid."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Palantir Foundry was challenging for us."
"From an organizational perspective, it is advisable to note that initially, the cost may be low, but as time passes, cost can be a significant factor in deciding whether to continue using Palantir Foundry or not, so those considerations should be taken into account."
"Palantir Foundry can be improved by providing more third-party application support and more support for the Ontology software development kit to develop more native applications rather than just web applications."
"If you want to create new models on specific data sets, computing that is quite costly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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 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 is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"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."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"It's expensive."
"Palantir Foundry is an expensive solution."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
"Palantir Foundry has different pricing models that can be negotiated."
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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
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. Palantir Foundry and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.