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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

"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"Overall, it's a great company and they have excellent software."
"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 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."
"Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization through multiple use cases, such as warranty data refinement, where previously we struggled with identifying the number of claims related to specific products."
"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 has positively impacted an organization where I previously worked, as it was a platform where developers, DevOps, and users could make changes together."
"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."
"Palantir Foundry has positively impacted my organization by increasing the operational throughput of the yard, which focuses on building new ships or repairing existing ones."
"Foundry's data visualization is fantastic."
"Based on my huge experience with Palantir Foundry, I find that starting from the data connection to the end user application, there is a tool for everyone."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"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."
"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."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"The formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Palantir Foundry was challenging for us."
"The theme is very monotonous and should be improved."
"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 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."
"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 has a steep learning curve and onboarding."
"The data lineage was challenging. It's hard to track data from the sources as it moves through stages. Informatica EDC can easily capture and report it because it talks to the metadata. This is generated across those various staging points."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is highly priced."
"It comes with a high cost."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"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."
"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."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"The solution’s pricing is high."
"It's expensive."
"Palantir Foundry is an expensive solution."
"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
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 Amazon Web Services (AWS), Informatica, Palantir and others in Cloud Data Integration. Updated: June 2026.
903,871 professionals have used our research since 2012.