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Confluent vs TIBCO BusinessWorks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Confluent
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (3rd)
TIBCO BusinessWorks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (15th)
 

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 9.4%, down 12.3% compared to last year.
TIBCO BusinessWorks, on the other hand, focuses on Data Integration, holds 1.0% mindshare, up 0.7% since last year.
Streaming Analytics
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Gustavo-Barbosa Dos Santos - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good technical support services and a valuable feature for real-time data streaming
Implementing Confluent's schema registry has significantly enhanced our organization's data quality assurance. It helps us understand the various requirements of multiple customers and validates the information for different versions. We can automate the tasks using Confluent Kafka. Thus, it guarantees us the data quality and maintains the integrity of message contracts.
Choon Hwa Khoh - PeerSpot reviewer
A java based platform, which is used for application integration and has a user-friendly GUI
I haven't encountered any drawbacks with TIBCO BusinessWorks so far. Despite being a new user for the past year, everything has been smooth, including development and deployment. 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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 best features of Confluent is that it's very easy to search and have a live status with Jira."
"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."
"It is also good for knowledge base management."
"Their tech support is amazing; they are very good, both on and off-site."
"The documentation process is fast with the tool."
"A person with a good IT background and HTML will not have any trouble with Confluent."
"XML to JSON transformations, out-of-the-box, helps to build REST services."
"Areas for improvement would be the cloud fitness of the product and the ease of migrating to newer versions."
"The Business Studio interface based on SCA Standards helps to show the business logic at first look and improve code maintenance."
"The most valuable part of the solution is the ease-of-use and ease of deployment."
"The high availability, tolerance, and load balancing features are top-notch. Its scalability features are also pretty cool."
"Good TIBCO BusinessWorks features are the admin console and the ability to roll back to the previous version."
"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."
"It is a seamless and sophisticated tool."
 

Cons

"It could have more integration with different platforms."
"It could be improved by including a feature that automatically creates a new topic and puts failed messages."
"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."
"The pricing model should include the ability to pick features and be charged for them only."
"There is no local support team in Saudi Arabia."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Though it is a stable product, if we have an issue with the product, it gets difficult, and it gets really difficult to explain the issue to the support team. Also, it takes a long time to get resolved."
"Its price can be improved. For medium enterprises, it is a very expensive tool. In the market, you won't get many resources for this solution. You won't find many developers in the market very easily. The latest version of TIBCO (6.4 or 6.x) is not very stable. It has got many issues. We have raised this with TIBCO, and they are taking a lot of time to come up with a fix, which is making us move away from this product. Some of the performance-tuning aspects are also missing in version 6. They should provide performance-related fixes, which will be helpful for the customers. If you are migrating from the current version to the container-supported version, it is quite expensive. The product has evolved, but it is very pricey. That's one of the challenges. They have provided all the features that are there in other products, but this is a platform upgrade. The platform has completely been changed from 5.x to 6.x, and we can't use the same environment. We can't run both versions on the same server as VM. The development environment is entirely different. In version 5.x, there was a proprietary designer. Now, it has common plug-ins developed on top of Eclipse."
"Technical support is average. It's not the best."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"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 initial setup is not easy."
"The communication protocols could be improved."
"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."
 

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."
"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."
"Confluent is highly priced."
"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."
"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."
"Confluent is expensive, I would prefer, Apache Kafka over Confluent because of the high cost of maintenance."
"My understanding is that the licensing is very costly."
"TIBCO BusinessWorks is a very expensive solution."
"TIBCO BusinessWorks is expensive."
"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."
"The cost depends on the components required."
"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."
"Its price policy has changed quite a lot in the last two years. It was extremely expensive previously. Nowadays, you can buy a license for BusinessWorks for €2000. Looking at what you get in return in terms of support, TIBCO community, and stability, it is fairly reasonable. It is not too expensive."
"I would rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Confluent?
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 to...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Confluent?
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 maintenanc...
What needs improvement with Confluent?
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 c...
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 do you like most about TIBCO BusinessWorks?
The ability to link to different technologies is valuable to us.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TIBCO BusinessWorks?
TIBCO BusinessWorks is a very expensive solution. Four years ago, we purchased four products with a two-course for 20 million dollars. This is a perpetual license.
 

Learn More

 

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: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.