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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

"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 most valuable feature of Confluent is the wide range of features provided. They're leading the market in this category."
"The most valuable is its capability to enhance the documentation process, particularly when creating software documentation."
"The monitoring module is impressive."
"Having used SharePoint in the past, when I compare with traditional, old document repositories, like SharePoint, I would definitely recommend Confluent."
"We primarily use Confluent for service desk and task management, and it is also good for knowledge base management."
"The biggest benefit of Confluent as a tool is that it is a distributed platform that provides more durability and stability."
"It is user friendly, it's not complex."
"The high availability, tolerance, and load balancing features are top-notch, and its scalability features are also pretty cool."
"The most important thing is that it is easy for developers to work with."
"TIBCO BusinessWorks' real-time data exchange capability has benefited our customers greatly; we conduct a lot of messaging with Superstream and external partners, so it works well for us."
"The most important thing is that it is easy for developers to work with, and BusinessWorks is robust, flexible, and scalable."
"Drag and drop make it easier to build the service end to end."
"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."
"Good TIBCO BusinessWorks features are the admin console and the ability to roll back to the previous version."
 

Cons

"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"Confluence could improve the server version of the solution. However, most companies are going to the cloud."
"Confluent's price needs improvement."
"From the control center perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement in the visualization."
"Confluent has a good monitoring tool, but it's not customizable."
"They should remove Zookeeper because of security issues."
"It requires some application specific connectors which are lacking. This needs to be added."
"It would be great if the knowledge based documents in the support portal could be available for public use as well."
"The cost of this product is too expensive for smaller companies or those with a small number of integrations."
"The initial setup process was not simple."
"Scaling with the solution is costly because if we need to scale up, we have to buy more memory. That means more money. Solutions like Camel or Pulsar come with built-in options to scale horizontally, vertically, region-wide or country-wide."
"Performance and latency could be enhanced. Additionally, having signaling stack support would be beneficial."
"In TIBCO BusinessWorks, the problem is that there are multiple plugins that increase the number of product installations."
"The learning curve takes time compared to webMethods."
"There are not many plugins available to integrate the databases. We have to write it in Java and integrate it. The developers should have more knowledge. These are the three main aspects that they could improve."
"Cloud fitness is lacking"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 an expensive solution."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"Confluent is an expensive solution as we went for a three contract and it was very costly for us."
"My understanding is that the licensing is very costly."
"I give the cost of the solution a four 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."
"The product is not cheap."
"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."
"TIBCO licensing is yearly and very costly for a company like ours."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
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.
892,868 professionals have used our research since 2012.