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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 (9th)
TIBCO BusinessWorks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (19th)
 

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 8.3% 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 Flink8.2%
Databricks7.9%
Other77.3%
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
TIBCO BusinessWorks1.0%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)3.7%
SSIS3.6%
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

"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."
"Some of the best features are that it's very quick to set up, very easy to have a centralized area that gives us a history of changes, and the ability to give feedback on any information placed onto the pages."
"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 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 design of the product is extremely well built and it is highly configurable."
"Confluent facilitates the messaging tasks with Kafka, streamlining our processes effectively."
"Kafka Connect framework is valuable for connecting to the various source systems where code doesn't need to be written."
"Performance and the stability are both good features."
"There hasn't been a single day that we had any problems because of the product stability."
"The most valuable feature is the integration."
"The tool's most valuable feature is BusinessConnect. It's an older product but still quite useful, especially for transferring files from one location to another."
"The real-time data exchange capability of TIBCO BusinessWorks has helped mission-critical systems because the uptime is superb."
"The solution is very scalable, it can handle a lot, and we have encryption plus integration servers running on that platform currently."
"Good TIBCO BusinessWorks features are the admin console and the ability to roll back to the previous version."
"The high availability, tolerance, and load balancing features are top-notch, and its scalability features are also pretty cool."
 

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."
"It could have more themes. The themes in the version I'm using are very limited; they offer two to three themes."
"There is a limitation when it comes to seamlessly importing Microsoft documents into Confluent pages, which can be inconvenient for users who frequently work with Microsoft Office tools and need to transition their content to Confluent."
"I am not very impressed by Confluent. We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"Areas for improvement include implementing multi-storage support to differentiate between database stores based on data age and optimizing storage costs."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"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."
"This solution's cloud could be improved. I don't know whether it was because we didn't have the internal expertise or if it was the product itself, but since they came later—I think only two or three years into the cloud—after many other iPaaS that had been in the cloud for longer, I feel that maybe they haven't matured in terms of the cloud."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"Technical support is average. It's not the best."
"Could be more user friendly in the development area."
"The cost of this product is too expensive for smaller companies or those with a small number of integrations."
"I think TIBCO needs to do a lot in terms of making it a first-class cloud solution."
"The latest version of TIBCO (6.4 or 6.x) is not very stable; it has got many issues, and TIBCO is taking a lot of time to come up with a fix, which is making us move away from this product."
"Overall, TIBCO BusinessWorks has not evolved properly over time, and right now, if you compare it to other solutions that have evolved drastically, TIBCO BusinessWorks will pale in comparison; it's an outdated product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"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."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"The product is not cheap."
"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."
"My understanding is that the licensing is very costly."
"The payments made for service are the only addition to the standard licensing fees that we pay for the solution."
"TIBCO BusinessWorks is expensive."
"I give the cost of the solution a four out of ten."
"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."
"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."
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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%
Construction Company
8%
Retailer
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.
896,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.