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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 (6th)
Palantir Foundry
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (13th), IT Operations Analytics (8th), Supply Chain Analytics (1st), Cloud Data Integration (10th), Data Migration Appliances (3rd), 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 solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"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."
"The biggest benefit of Confluent as a tool is that it is a distributed platform that provides more durability and stability."
"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 monitoring module is impressive."
"We ensure seamless management of Kafka through Confluent, allowing all of our Kafka activities to be handled by a third party."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"Foundry's data visualization is fantastic."
"The predictive analytics capability within Palantir Foundry impacts financial forecasting strategies through its AIP functionality, which includes numerous pre-built models, LLMs, and data science application libraries."
"Live video sessions enhance the available documentation and allow you to ask questions directly."
"If I think of Foundry as being an implementation of Apache Spark and compare that to Databricks, it is easier for an organization to use Foundry."
"I rate Palantir Foundry a ten out of ten."
"The best features Palantir Foundry offers include the semantic layer providing schema-level understanding about the data, low-code and no-code integration for ease without coding in the pipeline builder, AI Assist for assistance, Ontology for digital twin relationships, branching in pipeline level and Foundry branching for better management, zero-copy architecture for querying without massive data, data lineage for troubleshooting, and security changes that can be made in the pipeline builder and Ontology Workshop."
"In terms of improvements, it helped us improve our data migration timelines by approximately 60 percent and improved the data accuracy and addressed the issues upfront by approximately 85 percent."
"I like the data onboarding to Palantir Foundry and ETL creation."
 

Cons

"there is room for improvement in the visualization."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"When I started with Palantir Foundry, the initial deployment was not that great. I was not able to figure out certain things, because there are certain coding patterns that need to be followed in order to make it run."
"Cost of this solution is quite high."
"There are some issues with scalability because when we are using a really large dataset, the system is rather slow."
"As a developer, I find the limited documentation and less resource availability restrictive compared to other options such as AWS."
"There is not a wide user base for the solution's online documentation so it is sometimes difficult to find answers."
"Difficult to receive data from external sources."
"The solution’s data security could be improved."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 highly priced."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"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."
"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 solution is cheaper than other products."
"It's expensive."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
"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
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
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 Business5
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise31
 

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?
Regarding points for improvement for Palantir Foundry, I see that they are improving day by day. In the last one to two years, I have seen many improvements compared to the two years that I have wo...
What is your primary use case for Palantir Foundry?
There are several use cases that we are working on with Palantir Foundry. The first thing is for data model creation for all our data engineering pipelines. That is one use case. Palantir Foundry a...
What advice do you have for others considering Palantir Foundry?
The visualization part in Palantir Foundry works for me at least if I want to see how the data is structured and for an initial analysis, but I would say it is not as matured as Power BI or Tableau...
 

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: April 2026.
896,467 professionals have used our research since 2012.