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Confluent vs Palantir Foundry comparison

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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 (2nd), 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 most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"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 design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"Palantir Foundry is one of the most leading and comfortable tools to develop end-to-end data solutions."
"The data lineage is great."
"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 best features Palantir Foundry offers for my work include that building the ontology is very easy and it is easy to use."
"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."
"Palantir Foundry has improved with the generation of AI, and I think the governance and security are both good things to have in Palantir Foundry."
"I appreciate multiple aspects of Palantir Foundry, starting with the clean architecture and clean UI, and I really value how easily I can create and test Python and PySpark scripts, trace data lineage to debug issues, monitor daily pipelines and health checks, and quickly build very interactive Workshop applications, all supported by a clean and informative Resource Management UI that helps track costs and data usage."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"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."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"Regarding documentation, I find that when I face issues, the outdated documentation is not helpful; for example, while trying to create a webhook to fetch SharePoint metadata, I found available resources lacking relevance, needing significant updates to assist users properly."
"If it was my choice, I wouldn't sign the contract with Palantir in the first place. I would probably stick to standard Databricks."
"If you want to create new models on specific data sets, computing that is quite costly."
"I cannot advise someone to use Palantir Foundry due to cost efficiency and the complexity it introduces in handling large amounts of data."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Palantir Foundry was challenging for us."
"The solution could use more online documentation for new users."
"One challenge regarding how Palantir Foundry can be improved is the learning curve."
"The frontend capabilities of Palantir Foundry could be improved."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"Palantir Foundry is an expensive solution."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
"Palantir Foundry has different pricing models that can be negotiated."
"It's expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
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 Enterprise51
 

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: September 2026.
913,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.