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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

"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"We mostly use the solution's message queues and event-driven architecture."
"With Confluent Cloud we no longer need to handle the infrastructure and the plumbing, which is a concern for Confluent. The other advantage is that all portfolios have access to the data that is being shared."
"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"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 biggest benefit of Confluent as a tool is that it is a distributed platform that provides more durability and stability."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided; they're leading the market in this category."
"Our main goal is to validate whether we can build a scalable and cost-efficient way to replicate data from these various sources."
"One of the most valuable features is that it's a simple development, and it takes a short time to get services to work."
"The solution is very scalable. It can handle a lot. We have encryption plus integration servers running on that platform currently."
"I like TIBCO BusinessWorks because it has a user-friendly GUI for developing solutions."
"Good TIBCO BusinessWorks features are the admin console and the ability to roll back to the previous version."
"The initial setup of TIBCO BusinessWorks was straightforward since we have used the solution in our organization for a long time."
"BusinessWorks reduces development time, helping developers to focus on business logic."
"Good performance and reliability."
"It is very valuable for my work, helping me communicate with other branches, parse data, and change data formats to respond to the front channels with the correct format."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"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."
"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."
"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"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 Schema Registry service could be improved. I would like a bigger knowledge base of other use cases and more technical forums. It would be good to have more flexible monitoring features added to the next release as well."
"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."
"Improve Business Studio's stability to further minimize development time."
"There are multiple plugins which increase the number of product installations."
"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."
"A possible improvement could be to give the capability to use different profiles for each AppNode when an application is deployed on an AppSpace."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"Improve Business Studio's stability to further minimize development time."
"The learning curve takes time compared to webMethods."
"TIBCO BusinessWorks could be improved with cloud support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"It comes with a high cost."
"You have to pay additional for one or two features."
"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."
"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 has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"I would rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"I give the cost of the solution a four out of ten."
"The license is expensive, and I would rate it one out of ten."
"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."
"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."
"Licensing scheme is too rigid"
"TIBCO licensing is yearly and very costly for a company like ours."
"TIBCO BusinessWorks is a very expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Retailer
6%
 

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 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.
893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.