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Confluent vs TIBCO BusinessWorks 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)
TIBCO BusinessWorks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Confluent and TIBCO BusinessWorks aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Confluent is designed for Streaming Analytics and holds a mindshare of 6.6%, down 8.2% compared to last year.
TIBCO BusinessWorks, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.0% mindshare, down 1.1% since last year.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Confluent6.6%
Apache Flink8.9%
Databricks8.1%
Other76.4%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
TIBCO BusinessWorks1.0%
SSIS3.7%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)3.6%
Other91.7%
Data Integration
 

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.
Vinod_Parmar - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Solutions Architect at UNSW Australia
Long-term integration has supported real-time data exchange and simplified adapter-based workflows
The challenges I have faced with TIBCO BusinessWorks mostly relate to financial applications that do not come with those adapters, so that requires custom coding. The features currently in TIBCO BusinessWorks are good enough, but going forward, as we are doing a lot of AI-based integrations, I would like to see TIBCO come up with more prompt-driven configurations rather than people having to understand deep technology. AI-driven features in TIBCO BusinessWorks would be beneficial, so that our business tech BA can do the development rather than needing programmers. More artificial intelligence functionality would help so people do not have to code.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"Confluent is an amazing tool that is highly configurable, integrates very well with Jira, and lets you create nice documentation for various products while also supporting reporting and online content hosting."
"The design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"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."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"One of the best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"The solution can handle a high volume of data because it works and scales well."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"Drag and drop make it easier to build the service end to end."
"BusinessWorks reduces development time, helping developers to focus on business logic."
"Good TIBCO BusinessWorks features are the admin console and the ability to roll back to the previous version."
"It is a seamless and sophisticated tool."
"It's a great software application for the middleware use cases to connect the front channels to the back ends in a secure and safer way."
"The OSGI console is available to debug different issues and get low level informations on the applications development, like bundle, dependencies, etc."
"The high availability, tolerance, and load balancing features are top-notch, and its scalability features are also pretty cool."
"The most valuable feature is the low-code platform."
 

Cons

"Confluent has fallen behind in being the tool of the industry. It's taking second place to things such as Word and SharePoint and other office tools that are more dynamic and flexible than Confluent."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"The beginner who doesn't know how to work on HTML will struggle as when you create spaces in the Confluent, if you want to have some meeting notes or anything else, you need to know HTML and which HTML tags to include."
"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."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"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."
"TIBCO BusinessWorks could be improved with cloud support."
"I don't think I would recommend this solution to others."
"I would like the solution to be integrated into the cloud."
"The communication protocols could be improved."
"Pricing is not one of its strengths. Using Tibco BusinessWorks implies adopting a non-trivial set of products (Hawk, Rendez-vous, EMS in most cases), and previous cost models enabled scalability on installation and deployment."
"There is room for improvement on the learning side."
"Challenges with TIBCO BusinessWorks were mainly due to unclear documentation, but these were overcome by referring to comprehensive documents and raising tickets with TIBCO support."
"The learning curve takes time compared to webMethods."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"It comes with a high cost."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"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."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"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 solution is too expensive. It's one of the most expensive solutions out there, particularly because there are so many open-source competitors on the market. I don't know the exact numbers, however."
"My understanding is that the licensing is very costly."
"The product is not cheap."
"I don't have the prices of the products, but I know that TIBCO is not a cheap solution. I think that this solution is more suitable for large companies because I don't think that small- or medium-sized companies would have the money for this solution. WSO2 has the community version for free, so many of the smaller companies can use it. I'm not sure what the prices are for support, though, so I suppose the support for WSO2 is not cheap either."
"TIBCO licensing is yearly and very costly for a company like ours."
"The cost depends on the components required."
"I think BusinessWorks is more expensive compared to other products. We have the ELA, so at least we have some sort of bargain or discount with that. But for a start-up, it's very expensive compared to other ESBs."
"The license is expensive, and I would rate it one out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
Construction Company
7%
 

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 Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise24
 

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...
How does TIBCO BusinessWorks compare with Mule Anypoint Platform?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether TIBCO BusinessWorks or Mule Anypoint platform integration and connectivity software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Mule...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TIBCO BusinessWorks?
Because we have enterprise licenses, the pricing for TIBCO BusinessWorks is quite reasonable for us, so we do not see any issue.
What needs improvement with TIBCO BusinessWorks?
The challenges I have faced with TIBCO BusinessWorks mostly relate to financial applications that do not come with those adapters, so that requires custom coding. The features currently in TIBCO Bu...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ING, Priceline.com, Nordea, Target, RBC, Tivo, Capital One, Chartboost
Euler Hermes, QSuper, Scandinavian Airlines
Find out what your peers are saying about Confluent vs. TIBCO BusinessWorks and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,467 professionals have used our research since 2012.