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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
60
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

"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"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."
"To date, we have seen improvements in performance and scalability, so we recommend this solution."
"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."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"The client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"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."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization by enabling us to deliver projects quicker, as it organizes data from across the world into a dashboard that can be managed in one single location, accelerating business decisions made by the leadership team."
"The strength of Palantir Foundry is that there are no limitations, it is well organized, and the data is very secure."
"It has been the platform for end to end data processing, manipulations, and reporting, greatly improved org's data reporting effort."
"From my experience, one of the best features Palantir Foundry offers is that you have everything in one ecosystem."
"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."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted an organization where I previously worked, as it was a platform where developers, DevOps, and users could make changes together."
"Palantir Foundry is a robust platform that has really strong plugin connectors and provides features for real-time integration."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted our organization by making our processes straightforward and fast-moving, especially with features like AIP, an AI-powered assistance, and the low-code ability to create transformations quickly, which has benefited me significantly."
 

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."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"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."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"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 integration with different platforms."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"For example, exporting data from Palantir Foundry is very difficult and has many limitations."
"In my use of Palantir Foundry, many people can go in there and create datasets, save datasets, and share datasets. However, if many people make datasets of low quality or if they are using the same name for datasets, it can get very confusing."
"Compared to other hyperscalers, Palantir Foundry is complex and not so user-intuitive."
"There are some issues with scalability because when we are using a really large dataset, the system is rather slow."
"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."
"The solution’s data security could be improved."
"I rate Palantir Foundry five out of 10. I'm ambivalent."
"The problem is that interaction with outside applications can be difficult with the current setup that Palantir Foundry has."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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 is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"Palantir Foundry has different pricing models that can be negotiated."
"It's expensive."
"Palantir Foundry is an expensive solution."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
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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
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?
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 Confluent vs. Palantir Foundry and other solutions. Updated: July 2026.
904,016 professionals have used our research since 2012.