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Confluent vs StreamSets comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
StreamSets
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
24
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 9.4%, down 12.3% compared to last year.
StreamSets, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.7% mindshare, up 1.3% 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 client APIs are the most valuable feature."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"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."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"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 monitoring module is impressive."
"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."
"What I love the most is that StreamSets is very light. It's a containerized application. It's easy to use with Docker. If you are a large organization, it's very easy to use Kubernetes."
"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 customize it to do what you need. Many other tools have started to use features similar to those introduced by StreamSets, like automated workflows that are easy to set up."
"For me, the most valuable features in StreamSets have to be the Data Collector and Control Hub, but especially the Data Collector. That feature is very elegant and seamlessly works with numerous source systems."
"The Ease of configuration for pipes is amazing. It has a lot of connectors. Mainly, we can do everything with the data in the pipe. I really like the graphical interface too"
"The ability to have a good bifurcation rate and fewer mistakes is valuable."
"The entire user interface is very simple and the simplicity of creating pipelines is something that I like very much about it. The design experience is very smooth."
"The most valuable features are the option of integration with a variety of protocols, languages, and origins."
 

Cons

"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"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."
"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."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"One thing that I would like to add is the ability to manually enter data. The way the solution currently works is we don't have the option to manually change the data at any point in time. Being able to do that will allow us to do everything that we want to do with our data. Sometimes, we need to manually manipulate the data to make it more accurate in case our prior bifurcation filters are not good. If we have the option to manually enter the data or make the exact iterations on the data set, that would be a good thing."
"The data collector in StreamSets has to be designed properly. For example, a simple database configuration with MySQL DB requires the MySQL Connector to be installed."
"Using ETL pipelines is a bit complicated and requires some technical aid."
"StreamSet works great for batch processing but we are looking for something that is more real-time. We need latency in numbers below milliseconds."
"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."
"Sometimes, when we have large amounts of data that is very efficiently stored in Hadoop or Kafka, it is not very efficient to run it through StreamSets, due to the lack of efficiency or the resources that StreamSets is using."
"We create pipelines or jobs in StreamSets Control Hub. It is a great feature, but if there is a way to have a folder structure or organize the pipelines and jobs in Control Hub, it would be great. I submitted a ticket for this some time back."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"It comes with a high cost."
"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 is highly priced."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"The overall cost for small and mid-size organizations needs to be better."
"StreamSets is an expensive solution."
"I believe the pricing is not equitable."
"We are running the community version right now, which can be used free of charge."
"The pricing is affordable for any business."
"The pricing is good, but not the best. They have some customized plans you can opt for."
"It's not expensive because you pay per month, and the tasks you can perform with it are huge. It's reliable and cost-effective."
"There are two editions, Professional and Enterprise, and there is a free trial. We're using the Professional edition and it is competitively priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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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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: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.