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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 (5th)
Palantir Foundry
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (12th), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Supply Chain Analytics (1st), Cloud Data Integration (11th), 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.
SR
Architect at L&T Technology Services
Finds security and customization features impressive, although cost concerns persist
My experience with Palantir Foundry and Azure has been good. Palantir Foundry is costly, but Azure is open, which allows for easier experimentation. Being a closed product, Palantir Foundry is difficult to practice offline unless we have an enterprise edition. However, it is very secure compared to other platforms. Palantir Foundry's best features include security, built-in features, low-code, no-code platform, and ease of use. The collaborative workspaces within Palantir Foundry contribute to team efficiency and project outcomes through seamless operation. The ease of customization is particularly notable. I have worked with the data lineage feature in Palantir Foundry, which comes by default. We simply need to tick the checkbox and make necessary configuration changes within the system itself. We do not need to procure another lineage platform as Palantir Foundry has its own built-in features for data lineage, data governance, and data security. The lineage feature helps enhance our data management practices by allowing us to understand the origin of data, track all activities happening on the data, identify users and consumers, and monitor how it flows across the system. This makes it easier to generate reports based on the lineage database. 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. Using the AIP library within Palantir Foundry helps us develop quick resolutions for predictive models and analytics.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"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."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"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."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"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."
"Encapsulates all the components without the requirement to integrate or check compatibility."
"The interface is really user-friendly."
"I rate Palantir Foundry a ten out of ten."
"Great features available in one tool."
"The security is also excellent. It's highly granular, so the admins have a high degree of control, and there are many levels of security. That worked well. You won't have an EDC unless you put everything onto the platform because it is its own isolated thing."
"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."
"It is easy to map out a workflow and run trigger-based scripts without having to deploy to another server."
"I like the data onboarding to Palantir Foundry and ETL creation."
 

Cons

"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 formatting aspect within the page can be improved and more powerful."
"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"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."
"The frontend capabilities of Palantir Foundry could be improved."
"It would be helpful to build applications based on Azure functions or web apps in Palantir Foundry."
"The workflow could be improved."
"The startup pricing is high, causing concern despite being cost-effective in terms of total cost of ownership."
"Cost of this solution is quite high."
"The major hindrance with Palantir Foundry is that being a very closed product, the cost optimization and costing are not exposed to the end users."
"Some error messages can be very cryptic."
"The solution's visualization and analysis could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"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 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."
"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."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"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
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Confluent?
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 to...
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 do you like most about Palantir Foundry?
Palantir Foundry is a robust platform that has really strong plugin connectors and provides features for real-time integration.
What needs improvement with Palantir Foundry?
Apart from the pricing and offline availability issues, improvements are needed in Palantir Foundry's costing factor. Cost-wise, it is not open for everybody, and they are not exposing anything out...
What is your primary use case for Palantir Foundry?
One of the leading European manufacturing plants uses Palantir Foundry for manufacturing interior parts of various car brands such as Honda, Hyundai, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW. This involves hig...
 

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: December 2025.
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