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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

"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"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."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"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."
"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."
"Based on my experience, Palantir Foundry is extremely easy to learn and adjust to since it is primarily a closed system, meaning that all the functions for data ingestion, data cleaning, machine learning, and related tasks can be performed from within the same system."
"Palantir Foundry makes data reporting easier and reduces time in data gathering and reporting, where what would usually take about a day and a half of data gathering and reporting I have ultimately reduced to about 20 minutes."
"I like the data onboarding to Palantir Foundry and ETL creation."
"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 best features Palantir Foundry offers for my work include that building the ontology is very easy and it is easy to use."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"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."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"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."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"However, Palantir Foundry's license fees comparative to others are quite high."
"The Workshop application could be improved because it is not very customizable, but it is still very strong."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Palantir Foundry was challenging for us."
"Some error messages can be very cryptic."
"This system needs more powerful tools for the power user; I feel the system is very well designed for the introductory level but could have finer-grained controls for data engineering experts and machine learning experts at the power user level."
"The one area where improvement could be made is the cost of the solution which is quite expensive."
"The workflow could be improved."
"The problem is that interaction with outside applications can be difficult with the current setup that Palantir Foundry has."
 

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

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
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 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?
I think the things that I do not like about Palantir Foundry is not a Palantir issue so much as it is from my company side and what they have commissioned for and have not commissioned for. With Pa...
What is your primary use case for Palantir Foundry?
I use Palantir Foundry to ingest data and create visualizations for decisions.
 

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: July 2026.
906,887 professionals have used our research since 2012.