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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

"Confluence's greatest asset is its user-friendly interface, coupled with its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with a vast range of other solutions."
"Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance."
"As an enterprise organization, data availability is critical and Confluent provides that SLA support."
"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 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."
"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."
"The features I find most useful in Confluent are the Multi-Region Cluster, MRC, and the Cluster Linking for replication."
"The most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided; they're leading the market in this category."
"Good TIBCO BusinessWorks features are the admin console and the ability to roll back to the previous version."
"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."
"Areas for improvement would be the cloud fitness of the product and the ease of migrating to newer versions."
"The most valuable features are the stability and the time to market."
"The solution is very scalable, it can handle a lot, and we have encryption plus integration servers running on that platform currently."
"It is a seamless and sophisticated tool."
"The most valuable feature is the low-code platform."
"It is a seamless and sophisticated tool, we can operate everything and scale up and down the instances, and it is also very user-friendly with a good overall experience."
 

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."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about Confluent charging high fees while not offering features that match those of other tools."
"there is room for improvement in the visualization."
"In Confluent, there could be a few more VPN options."
"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"We continuously face issues, such as Kafka being down and slow responses from the support team."
"The solution could have an extra plugin or upgrading feature. In addition, it could have more integration with different platforms and be more compatible."
"Areas for improvement would be the cloud fitness of the product and the ease of migrating to newer versions."
"I would like the solution to be integrated into the cloud."
"They don't support out of the box - you have to buy adapters or you have to have the technology."
"The technical support's turnaround time is an area where TIBCO needs to consider improvements...Getting support from TIBCO on a particular issue takes a lot of turnaround time."
"The creation of XSDs should be much simpler."
"There are multiple plugins which increase the number of product installations."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"Improve Business Studio's stability to further minimize development time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Confluent is an expensive solution."
"Confluent has a yearly license, which is a bit high because it's on a per-user basis."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"The solution is cheaper than other products."
"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 an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"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."
"TIBCO BusinessWorks is a very expensive solution."
"The cost depends on the components required."
"The payments made for service are the only addition to the standard licensing fees that we pay for the solution."
"The license is expensive, and I would rate it one out of ten."
"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."
"My understanding is that the licensing is very costly."
"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."
"It is a bit expensive for medium-sized companies. If you are migrating from the current version to the container-supported version, it is quite expensive. The existing licensing will not work because the product platform itself is different."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing 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.
892,678 professionals have used our research since 2012.