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Confluent vs StreamSets comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
StreamSets
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Confluent and StreamSets aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Confluent is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 9.1%, down 12.1% compared to last year.
StreamSets, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.8% mindshare, up 1.4% since last year.
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming
Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance. It helps us understand the various requirements of multiple customers and validates the information for different versions. We can automate the tasks using Confluent Kafka. Thus, it guarantees us the data quality and maintains the integrity of message contracts.
Reyansh Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
We no longer need to hire highly skilled data engineers to create and monitor data pipelines
The things I like about StreamSets are its * overall user interface * efficiency * product features, which are all good. Also, the scheduling within the data engineering pipeline is very much appreciated, and it has a wide range of connectors for connecting to any data sources like SQL Server, AWS, Azure, etc. We have used it with Kafka, Hadoop, and Azure Data Factory Datasets. Connecting to these systems with StreamSets is very easy. You just need to configure the data sources, the paths and their configurations, and you are ready to go. It is very efficient and very easy to use for ETL pipelines. It is a GUI-based interface in which you can easily create or design your own data pipelines with just a few clicks. As for moving data into modern analytics systems, we are using it with Microsoft Power BI, AWS, and some on-premises solutions, and it is very easy to get data from StreamSets into them. No hardcore coding or special technical expertise is required. It is also a no-code platform in which you can configure your data sources and data output for easy configuration of your data pipeline. This is a very important aspect because if a tool requires code development, we need to hire software developers to get the task done. By using StreamSets, it can be done with a few clicks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"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 client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"It is really easy to set up and the interface is easy to use."
"The UI is user-friendly, it doesn't require any technical know-how and we can navigate to social media or use it more easily."
"The best feature that I really like is the integration."
"The scheduling within the data engineering pipeline is very much appreciated, and it has a wide range of connectors for connecting to any data sources like SQL Server, AWS, Azure, etc. We have used it with Kafka, Hadoop, and Azure Data Factory Datasets. Connecting to these systems with StreamSets is very easy."
"Also, the intuitive canvas for designing all the streams in the pipeline, along with the simplicity of the entire product are very big pluses for me. The software is very simple and straightforward. That is something that is needed right now."
"The most valuable would be the GUI platform that I saw. I first saw it at a special session that StreamSets provided towards the end of the summer. I saw the way you set it up and how you have different processes going on with your data. The design experience seemed to be pretty straightforward to me in terms of how you drag and drop these nodes and connect them with arrows."
"The ability to have a good bifurcation rate and fewer mistakes is valuable."
"The ETL capabilities are very useful for us. We extract and transform data from multiple data sources, into a single, consistent data store, and then we put it in our systems. We typically use it to connect our Apache Kafka with data lakes. That process is smooth and saves us a lot of time in our production systems."
 

Cons

"there is room for improvement in the visualization."
"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"It could have more themes. They should also have more reporting-oriented plugins as well. It would be great to have free custom reports that can be dispatched directly from Jira."
"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."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"Sometimes, it is not clear at first how to set up nodes. A site with an explanation of how each node works would be very helpful."
"One area for improvement could be the cloud storage server speed, as we have faced some latency issues here and there."
"There aren't enough hands-on labs, and debugging is also an issue because it takes a lot of time. Logs are not that clear when you are debugging, and you can only select a single source for a pipeline."
"Currently, we can only use the query to read data from SAP HANA. What we would like to see, as soon as possible, is the ability to read from multiple tables from SAP HANA. That would be a really good thing that we could use immediately. For example, if you have 100 tables in SQL Server or Oracle, then you could just point it to the schema or the 100 tables and ingestion information. However, you can't do that in SAP HANA since StreamSets currently is lacking in this. They do not have a multi-table feature for SAP HANA. Therefore, a multi-table origin for SAP HANA would be helpful."
"We've seen a couple of cases where it appears to have a memory leak or a similar problem."
"The monitoring visualization is not that user-friendly. It should include other features to visualize things, like how many records were streamed from a source to a destination on a particular date."
"We often faced problems, especially with SAP ERP. We struggled because many columns weren't integers or primary keys, which StreamSets couldn't handle. We had to restructure our data tables, which was painful. Also, pipeline failures were common, and data drifting wasn't addressed, which made things worse. Licensing was another issue we encountered."
"If you use JDBC Lookup, for example, it generally takes a long time to process data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is highly priced."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"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."
"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."
"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 has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"I believe the pricing is not equitable."
"There are two editions, Professional and Enterprise, and there is a free trial. We're using the Professional edition and it is competitively priced."
"StreamSets Data Collector is open source. One can utilize the StreamSets Data Collector, but the Control Hub is the main repository where all the jobs are present. Everything happens in Control Hub."
"It has a CPU core-based licensing, which works for us and is quite good."
"The licensing is expensive, and there are other costs involved too. I know from using the software that you have to buy new features whenever there are new updates, which I don't really like. But initially, it was very good."
"Its pricing is pretty much up to the mark. For smaller enterprises, it could be a big price to pay at the initial stage of operations, but the moment you have the Seed B or Seed C funding and you want to scale up your operations and aren't much worried about the funds, at that point in time, you would need a solution that could be scaled."
"StreamSets is an expensive solution."
"There are different versions of the product. One is the corporate license version, and the other one is the open-source or free version. I have been using the corporate license version, but they have recently launched a new open-source version so that anybody can create an account and use it. The licensing cost varies from customer to customer. I don't have a lot of input on that. It is taken care of by PMO, and they seem fine with its pricing model. It is being used enterprise-wide. They seem to have got a good deal for StreamSets."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
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 maintenanc...
What needs improvement with Confluent?
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 c...
What do you like most about StreamSets?
The best thing about StreamSets is its plugins, which are very useful and work well with almost every data source. It's also easy to use, especially if you're comfortable with SQL. You can customiz...
What needs improvement with StreamSets?
We often faced problems, especially with SAP ERP. We struggled because many columns weren't integers or primary keys, which StreamSets couldn't handle. We had to restructure our data tables, which ...
What is your primary use case for StreamSets?
StreamSets is used for data transformation rather than ETL processes. It focuses on transforming data directly from sources without handling the extraction part of the process. The transformed data...
 

Comparisons

 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Availity, BT Group, Humana, Deluxe, GSK, RingCentral, IBM, Shell, SamTrans, State of Ohio, TalentFulfilled, TechBridge
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. StreamSets and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.